I'm not too familiar with LAME. I use MusicMatch for my encoding, which uses the Fraunhoffer encoder. MusicMatch has a 1%-100% "Quality" setting for it's VBR encoding. I assume it varies the range of bitrates it uses, or perhaps the ceiling bitrate? Not too familiar with that. Problem is that the empeg has a problem interpreting the total time of a VBR file that was encoded by Fraunhoffer. We've been discussing that in a different thread.

I suppose I could put together a Linux box (been meaning to) and set it up with LAME to do all my encoding. I'd actually be curious to do comparisons between a Fraunhoffer encoded file and a LAME encoded file at the same bitrates.

How do your VBR file sizes compare to a fixed bitrate file (on average)? Is file size around 128, 160, 192, etc?