Is CBR and more "reliable" than VBR?

I'm sure I can get a sound quality that I'm satisfied with for casual listenning. What I'm really concerned about is compatibility or "reliability." What I want to avoid is encoding a whole bunch of CD's just to find that VBR is more prone to problems than CBR. What's your opinion in this respect?

Thanks,

Larry

I just did some experimenting with various CBR and VBR encodes and transferring them to the iPod. Using Media Center 9, I noticed that between the first two songs on one album (Madonna "Ray of Light"), where one song goes directly into the next, the end of the first song was just slightly clipped when using VBR. I tried playing with several settings (high quality, encode while ripping, etc.) and found that the iPod always had the same problem at this point.

I then tried a few CBR rips of the first song and found that as long as the first song was a CBR rip, the skip did not happen. The little "click" problem between songs was still there, but at least the transition didn't miss any beats.

In other words, there was definitly a downside to using VBR in this particular case. It seems that at the end of a track, the VBR encoding causes the VERY end of the song to be skipped. This is usually not apparent since most songs fade out at this point. The problem only presented itself when one song went right into the next. I'm going to try another album, but the results with "Ray of Light" were 100% consistent.

Update: I tried Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon (track 1 goes directly into track 2) and noticed the same thing. While the CBR files still have a short gap between the two songs (along with the click) the VBR versions actually miss a little bit of the ending of the first track when the seam hits -- i.e. the CBR version is not seamless, but it is "more" seamless than the VBR version.

It should be noted that Media Center AND Media Player both had a short gap in between songs as well (even with the "gapless" setting in Media Center.) I am quite disappointed in this -- i.e. I had thought that the only downside of mp3's was the slightly lower quality. To discover that none of these players (most importantly the iPod) can play "continuous" songs without ANY interruptions is very disappointing. Is there any way around this?

Thanks,

Larry