With only days before the Microsoft Zune hits the street, some additional information about the Zune Marketplace have surfaced.
Jason Dunn, over at Zune Thoughts, found out that downloads will be offered in 192 kbps WMA format. It’s not clear whether this will be CBR (constant bit rate encoding) or VBR (variable bit rate encoding). In comparison, MSN Music offered downloads as 160 kbps VBR WMA files (before its shutdown) and iTunes offers 128kbps protected AAC files.
The Zune Marketplace will also let people re-download purchased songs up to five times (and perhaps even more if you call their technical support). This is a much more liberal policy than iTunes’ which is basically one download per purchase (although there have been cases where Apple technical support has waived that).