Filed under: iPod Family
Princeton students get free tunes that won't play on iPods
Princeton has made a deal with Virginia-based Ruckus to provide free music to all their undergraduate students. Ruckus, which has licensed 1.5 million tracks from various music labels, provides unlimited access to their library apparently in exchange for advertising to a captive audience.
Unfortunately, this deal leaves Mac and iPod users in the cold. The Plays4Sure DRM only works on Windows and a limited number of players. Princeton students will have to pony up a little extra money and a compatible player to have access to the Ruckus-to-go feature if they want to take their tunes off their PC and onto their player. On the bright side, if you can call it that, the Zune doesn't do Plays4Sure either.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John Ryan Pryzbylek said 10:41AM on 12-15-2006
Must be a slow news day since Ruckus has been making these kinds of deals for over a year now. As an example, I've been using Ruckus at the University of Toledo since the Spring semester and while it doesn't work with Macs or my iPod, it does provide a decent source for music while I'm at work.
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Illtron said 11:50AM on 12-15-2006
Wow, doesn't get much stupider than this. Here's what will happen. Nobody will give a rat's ass about this stupid Ruckus thing, and students will continue to download music from Limewire and BitTorrent to use on the iPods. Nobody's giving up their iPods to get content. They'll get the content on their iPods one way or another. Tough break, Princeton, you just threw away a bunch of money and didn't solve a problem in the process.
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AndyB said 11:05AM on 12-15-2006
The College where I work looked into this (the Student Gov't really wanted it until they found out there's no iPod support). Ironically, one of the options is to serve this music locally on campus and Ruckus GIVES you the server. What server you ask? An Xserve, of course.
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AndyB said 7:53AM on 12-20-2006
Also, BTW, my College is about 5 miles from Princeton
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Hank said 12:18PM on 12-15-2006
"Plays4Sure DRM only works on Windows and a limited number of players"
Then maybe the should change the name to Plays4Some.
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Sam G. said 11:46AM on 12-15-2006
On a similar topic, I'm sort of surprised that more colleges haven't signed on to iTunes U. I'd think it would be a no-brainer.
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Giga said 11:46AM on 12-15-2006
Georgia Tech just started ruckus this semester as well. No one really uses the junk though.
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super1geek said 11:50AM on 12-15-2006
My state college in Arkansas just did the same recently. It really is a pain to hear everyone talking about all the free music ruckus gives them and then not be able to use any of it on their iPods...
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Brychanus said 12:27PM on 12-15-2006
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.
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Robert said 12:34PM on 12-15-2006
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).
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Ben said 12:43PM on 12-15-2006
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.
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ben said 12:51PM on 12-15-2006
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.
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Fred said 2:21PM on 12-15-2006
Calling this crippled technology "Plays4Sure" is funny on its own :)
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frozen said 12:04AM on 12-17-2006
University of Oklahoma uses this as well... and pushes it hard... I give out oink invited instead. :]
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John said 11:31AM on 12-16-2006
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.
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Ken said 1:03PM on 12-16-2006
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.
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lieven said 4:48PM on 12-16-2006
Anyone else find it funny they use WebObjects for their site?
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sixhoursago said 10:43PM on 12-16-2006
Ruckus is an absolutely horrible experience. I am ashamed that my school is affiliated with them.
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