iv'e got an old flash rom portable that runs on AA's. I was wondering if resampling my mp3's into 32KHz would increase the battery life? by how much? anyone done any testing?

also i heard VBR drains more battery life, in addition to higher bitrates. can anyone shed any light on this?

VBR doesn't really take any more CPU to decode so I'd say VBR doesn't reduce battery life. Samplerate doesn't have anything to do with the filesize so I wouldn't resample. The higher the bitrate the more the data has to be read from the flash ROM to the players memory which will decrease battery far faster than about anything else.

Flash players tend to have pretty good battery life anyway due to having no moving parts.

In practise, a lower samplerate would lower the bitrate needed for a given quality.

because flash players battery life is mostly eaten up by processing, i'd surmise that the sample rate would have an affect on the battery life. but how much?

I remember on my 486 i had to halve the samplerate to play mp3 files without skipping, but a lot has changed since then.

If you seek more play time i suggest you buy some good 2000mAh or more rechargable AA's so you can just swap batteries. I wouldn't even be surprised if they last longer than normal alkalines.

i agree go for 2000mah or 2500 you will save money and time the first week you use it
(don't loose the batteries