Rhythmbox transcoding to portable player

[Rob Owens <rowens@ptd.net>]

When I drag a song to my portable player, using Rhythmbox, it transcodes
to the song to mp3.  But the bitrate is too low, and I cannot get it to
change.  I have tried changing the format settings in Preferences,
Music, Library Structure, but that doesn't have any impact on the
bitrate for files getting tranferred to my portable player.

How can I adjust those settings?

Alternatively, could you recommend some other method of transcoding and
transferring songs to a portable player and a plain old usb stick?  I
know soundconverter can do it, but it's not as nice to use when you have
a really large music collection -- Rhythmbox has search ability to make
this pretty easy.

-Rob