Princeton students get free tunes that won't play on iPods

Ruckus is an absolutely horrible experience. I am ashamed that my school is affiliated with them.

Anyone else find it funny they use WebObjects for their site?

Same story for Brown U. My roommate has a windows-running tower, so we usually use that for music. As far as I can tell ruckus doesn't strain the network too much, probably because few people use it. Almost everyone here has an iPod (as do I) and mac users get left out in the cold (unless you have windows floating around on your mac of course.) Most people who know how to strip the DRM from the stuff, and move it around, as the others have said.

They started Ruckus here at Penn a while back. I don't use it (I wouldn't be a very good Apple Campus Rep if I did), but from what I gather most people use it and the DRM-stripper to put it on their iPods. I imagine Ruckus is simply looking the other way on this to encourage its use. Classy.

University of Oklahoma uses this as well... and pushes it hard... I give out oink invited instead. :]

Calling this crippled technology "Plays4Sure" is funny on its own :)

we've been using ruckus at washu for a long time.
as for the person who said students would just use bittorrent and limewire instead... they've all been effictively blocked on campus. the ports are blocked and i believe they also do packet sniffing.

that said, people have fixed out a way to break the drm.

That is retarded. I remember coming across a survey a few months ago that said Princeton has the most Mac users of any college, or maybe the most incoming students using Macs, or something like that. Wouldn't you expect, then, that most students with mp3 players would have iPods (rather than something else)? Dumb.

I'm a student at USC and we have had Ruckus for a while now. It's not as great as it seems (besides the DRM), they often have outages where their server is down so if you download any new music files, they wont play because you can't get a license. And their website where you download the music from, is really really slow.

A program called FairUse4WM allows you to remove the Plays4Sure DRM from music that you have a license for. I consider it "fair use" to remove the DRM in order that I put the music on iTunes in OS X and on my iPod (I use bootcamp to run the Ruckus program).

University of Denver started offering free Ruckus to it students this past fall. It was a terrible decision. For nearly a month there were times of the day, every day, when the campus connection to the internet was nearly unusable due to the added traffic from students downloading songs. Over the course of last quarter, the University actually had to buy additional bandwidth and hardware to handle the increased traffic. Sure, Ruckus gave the students, most of whom have iPods, tunes to play on their PC's, but the cost to the University was massive.