stuttering sound

[cobolco]

Please can someone help me. I have just bought an mp3 car cd player and wanted to make cd's for the car, by putting several cd's onto one cdr. I have easy cd creator 5 and tried converting them with that but the sound quality at 128k bit rate was poor; with a shimmering sound all the time. I reckoned that a variable bit encoder may be the answer, as I have downloaded songs from the internet at 128k and most sounded fine but some don't. So, there must be a good way of encoding !! I downloaded this programme from ZDNET because of the rave reviews for it. My problem is that when encoding to mp3 with a variable bit rate set, the resulting playback in windows media player 7.1 is stuttering, and the player window says the bit rate of the file is only 50k. What am I doing wrong? Also, is it right that it should take around 15 mins to convert a standard album (moonwalk-earth,wind & fire - 8 tracks about 37 mins), and also when I get the file conversion right, will I be able to play the file in my car mp3 player, or will I have to have them encoded with standard (non variable bit rate) conversion. Sorry for the long post but better to get all the questions in at once !! Thanks in advance from Colin.

[Spoon]

What are you converting from? existing mp3s?

[cobolco]

Thanks for the reply.
I am trying to convert tracks from commercial cd's to mp3 format in order to get as many albums on one cd, to use in the car player (which is mp3 friendly). I have tried 128k (at constant bit rate) which seems to be o.k. but I don't much like the shimmering artifact that is present in the converted file. I have just been putting the cd in, then using the rip options to change the compression format. If I use constant bit rate, it works fine, but if I try to use variable bit rate then the file plays back stuttering intermittently, and the bit rate on the lower window in media player says it is only 50k. I have however experimented with the slider and found that if I move the "lowest bit rate" slider higher, then the more I move it higher, the less it stutters and when I got to (i think it was) 192k, the stuttering stopped. When I had the fault originally mentioned, I had moved this slider down to 128k, for no other reason as that is the number I had encoded at in constant bit rate. Have you any idea what's going on ? I should also tell you that I recently installed windows media player 9 release candidate, but had to un-install it because it was going very slowly. I used system restore properly, but maybe it left something behind that is interfering with this process. I have an athlon 1600 xp processor and 256 ddr ram. Thanks colin

[Spoon]

Try a different audio player such as my own dBpowerAMP Audio Player.