Variable bitrate

I would love to see VS support variable bit rate. If it also allows to control the bit-rate per user/group, that would be great. I know this would be costly on the processor as it needs to take the load to dynamically re-encode the mp3, but it would be good to have if someone wants to take that overhead compared to flexibility. In my case, I have some audio discourses which I would like to expose to audience, which are encoded at 160+ kbps. As I have about 30 gig worth of them, its tough for me to manually re-encode them and keep multiple copies. Instead, I would maintain a bigger hardware to do this dynamically based on user settings. Any considerations on this?

you would have to totally rewrite the core of VS. It's not a real-time audio encoder and streamer like IceCast or Shoutcast. Even the network code is difficult to write and even for the player...