Okay, I have an Ipod for general listening (I know, Ipods are bad, but it was free so hey), but I recently recieved a vcast music phone with all the goodies, the earbuds are actually quite good. I have converted my entire itunes library to .m4a without any DRM so I'm free to do what I want with the music I bought (Kind of ironic to have to do that in the first place...), but I've been having trouble with filetypes. I first tried 160kbps VBR, but that wasn't supported. I then tried what I THOUGHT was 160 CBR, and it didn't work either, WMP was doing a convert before it put it on the phone, and transcoding from .m4a, to mp3 and then to mp3 again is a sure way to have a really crappy sounding song, so I've been trying to find what works. I converted one song to 160 CBR with Foobar and it worked, so I'm hoping it's okay. My questions are these. 1. Does anyone know what bitrates and types (CBR, ABR, VBR) are supported by VCast phones (LG VX8300), 2. What compression level is acceptable for a playback device of this type (What level can I get it down to without hearing a massive degradation of quality), and 3. Is there a faster way to transcode? Foobar2000 is showing an estimated time of 4 hours right now for around 600 songs.

Thanks,
Nathan

From what I can gather, the current LG phones support AAC, HE-AAC and MP3 - but all CBR only, not ABR or VBR.

You'll have to judge that for yourself, but for my portable player:
MP3: 112 kbps
AAC: 96 kbps
HE-AAC: 48 kbps

Okay thanks, I didn't think it would work with AAC, I'll try it, because then it would be much easier for me.

For reasons like this, i'd use a higher bitrate than most people use for mp3-capable cell phones. If it doesn't support VBR, 160 CBR isn't such a bad choice really. 112 CBR and a transcode at that, i don't know the concept behind this... torture your ears on the road, then rehabilitate with the proper quality at home?

I used 160kbps CBR, it's not quite as compact, but I can listen to it without getting a headache, and that's the important thing.