Comment 21 for bug 195483

To verify that VBR is actually working after you have encoded your files you will need to use a media player that will report back to you real time statistics about what is happening during decoding. Programs like Winamp for windows or the Linux version XMMS (I think the project is dead though) will give you the feedback in real time. Also you may use VLC with the media information (ctrl-i).

I've been looking and looking for good information, everyone seems to have a little variation on VBR with Sound Juicer. This is the current setup I'm running and it seems to work. I'm getting ~220k.

---
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=0 vbr=4 vbr-quality=0 vbr-min-bitrate=32 vbr-max-bitrate=256 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux
---
Links of use:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=839198

http://www.pizon.org/articles/adding-mp3-support-to-gnome.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=952807&highlight=Sound+Juicer+options+vbr

Cheers!