VBR = Very Bad Rate
Never rip MP3 with variable bitrate enabled encoder, since various players don’t have good support for that. Several Linux music players (like Rhythmbox and Muine misreport the time and/or bitrate with absurd values. Even more amusing thing is, Nautilus reports a random song length every time I want to check their file properties.
The worst among them is Real Player. How does Real Player handle VBR mp3? Chops it randomly. At random location near end of song (random location even for the same song), so random that there is even a small chance that the song is played at full length, not chopped at all. At first I tried it on the Real Player bundled with Motorola E680i; a while ago tried it again on PC, and got the same result.
One shall pay the price for saved disk space.