Ruckus is an online music store for students and alumni, with a twist: it’s completely free. Join me in this article as I review this service and explain how to work around the DRM restrictions – to make the songs compatible with iPods, Macs and Zune.
Of course there are some limitations and annoyances with Ruckus, but considering it’s completely free and legal – two words that don’t play nice together – it’s worth it.
Selection
The Ruckus website boasts a large figure, over 3 millions songs and quite a lot of music videos – all encoded at a good bitrate. I haven’t counted all the songs in the store, but I’ve found a great rock selection, and albums that I wanted to have for a long time; and since there is no cost to downloading, it’s a great way to find new artists and discover their music.
You will find that the catalog is more inclined to the mainstream listeners, but there are some gems suitable for indie lovers.
Songs
Most albums are encoded at a decent bitrate, even by audiophile standards – 192kbps. With older songs, you might not be as lucky – just 128kbps. I’ve downloaded about 12 albums, and only one was encoded at the lower bitrate, so that’s not a big problem.
Now here comes the bad news; All songs are encoded in Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (.wma) and protected by DRM. With the free plan, you will only be able to listen to the songs on your computer.
For 4.99$, you get the ability to sync the songs to a ‘PlaysForSure’ compatible device, such as the iriver players. By default, you won’t be able to play these songs on an iPod or a Zune, but I’ve found a workaround to fix that.
Not much of an issue these days, the software needs an internet connection to update the licenses for the songs, once a month.
I’ve also noticed that the filenames are not normalized and some metadata is missing on certain albums: details like genre, year, or composer. I didn’t see the album art when I imported the songs into Windows Media Player either. However that is easily fixed by following these steps:
Right-Click on Album Cover > Find Album Info > Save Media Information Changes
[Later Edit] Forgot to mention that you can’t preview the songs before downloading them on the website. I’ve also found that some more obscure bands have pulled down their albums and although they appear in the store, you can’t download them.
Ruckus Player
Once you login for the first time and try to download a song, you are presented with a dialog box requiring you to install the Ruckus Player – which has three big features:
- Downloads your songs to your specified folder
- Acquires and updates licenses for the songs
- Plays your songs and music videos
- Provides you with a recommendation service, similar to Genius.
Although it didn’t crash during our tests and downloaded all the songs successfully, I’m not terribly impressed with the Ruckus player. The developers didn’t take enough time to polish the interface – having to squint at the monitor to see the now playing song isn’t that appealing. You’re better off just importing the songs into Windows Media Player.
Ruckus is ad-supported, so unless you’re running AdBlock you’ll see some ads.
Conclusion
As a whole, the Ruckus experience can’t be compared with iTunes or Amazon: ugly, slow, restricted. But the situation changes dramatically when you work around those restrictions to get rid of the DRM: free music for your iPod, at a decent bitrate. If you’re a student with a little tech know-how and time, this is a deal you can’t miss.
The legality of these procedures can be debated – but it seems Microsoft is doing anything about it yet. Without getting myself in trouble I can say that ‘FairUse4WM Mil0tis’ (about half way down the page) can be used to succesfully strip the DRM. Visit the link I provided, follow the instructions and you’ll be good to go in about 2 hours – from then on it’s just a simple process of downloading and clicking a button or two. To import the fresh DRM-free songs in iTunes, just drag and drop them into the window.
In theory, you won’t be in any trouble if you proceed with these instructions, nobody can know what you are doing with the songs after you download them. It’s a lot of overhead but this is a lot safer than using BitTorrent.
March 4 2009 EDIT: Ruckus shut down.
I want to hear from fellow FairUuse4WM users/ RUckus users, as well as people using Amazon or iTunes. Do you like the idea behind Ruckus? Discovered some nice bands?
The idea behind Ruckus makes a lot of sense, and I don't mind the fact that they are ad supported. I've even used it legitimately, without trying to work around the DRM (great for quickly getting together playlists to use at parties — just plug the laptop into speakers and you're good to go).
However, when I'm really in the mood for discovering new music, I use Pandora and Last.fm.
Yeah, Pandora and Last.fm are a very good for discovering new bands.
"The legality of these procedures can be debated"
I'm no expert on this but as far as I know if you remove the DRM from the music then its illegal but if you use an application to play and re-record the music its not(it's forgiveable at least), most DRM removal software uses this technique anyway. Someone will have to look deeper into that and I guess it's different in different countries.
I wish music publishers would realise that DRM is completely useless, if the music can be played the DRM can be removed and it only takes one to have it up on the torrents. I would use Ruckus but as it requires Windows I'll have to pass. There's quite a few services that let you download music with an ad embeded at the begining/end, I'd find removing that much easier than having to load up windows and remove the DRM but It's mostly indie stuff.
I should look into that. The technique I';m using removes the DRM header – lossless decoding.