The Creative players don't care if its vbr or 256. I also use Exact Audio Copy and had no issues with the Creative player decoding the files.

Bart

Quote Originally Posted by iamjacksadrenalgland
i have a question ... i rip my own mp3's using Exact Audio Copier to get very high quality mp3's ... are there players that let you store music in variable bit-rate or higher bit-rate formats? all the units i looked at make you convert/compress to their format, rather than just storing the data as is.