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Originally Posted by RD100
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... why would someone want to choose Constant over Variable ? Your explanation leads me to believe that VBR would produce a smaller file, and ultimately have the same quality as the CBR. So why would anyone choose CBR over VBR ? 
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The primary reason for choosing CBR is when you are transferring over limited bandwidth. A good example is web radio which always uses a fixed maximum rate, if it didn't then the listeners would get dropouts as the encoder would encode higher than the average rate half of the time (on average :rolling:). This is linked to the other reason which is predictability of the output files' size, with CBR you know what size an MP3 of any given length will be before you encode it.
VBR won't always produce smaller files (they should be about the same size) but it
should always outperform CBR encoding with regard to quality as the available bits are used more intelligently.
One last thing, because of the vast differences in audio recordings some 128k MP3s sound great whereas others sound awful. I prefer to encode once using a quality based method as it is much quicker than the "suck it and see" approach which can entail multiple encoding sessions.