Uni High Gargoyle Staff Blog

Usually, when I see the words free, legal, and music in the same sentence, it means nothing.

There are many places on the Web where you can legally download free songs, but virtually all of those songs are from artists you’ve never heard of and probably never need to hear of. That’s not to say that all freely available tracks suck — a very, very select few are decent — but still.

Anyways, what caught my attention about Ruckus.com was its large collection of songs that you actually hear people talking about and listening to. I registered for an account and did a test search for The Fray, whose album “How To Save A Life” has been very popular for quite a while now.

All of the songs on that album were available for download. To see how well it worked, I selected my two favorite — “How To Save A Life” and “Over My Head” — and within about a minute, I was able to play them back in both Ruckus’ own player (which is required to download the songs) and Windows Media Player 11. The tracks were pretty high-quality, too: 192Kbps WMA files.

But of course, there is a catch. Three catches, actually — for starters, you have to have an email address ending in “.edu” to even sign up. Uni students need not worry about that, though, since @uni.uiuc.edu addresses qualify.

Secondly, these tracks are copy-protected (DRM‘d, in other words). You can only play them back on your computer — you won’t be able to burn them to a CD or transfer them to another device. For a small monthly charge, you gain the rights to transfer them to a compatible portable device — but, unfortunately for many, the iPod isn’t one of them.

However, DRM is far from flawless. I remember reading a news article once with a quote that went something like, “Trying to make digital files not copyable is like trying to make water not wet.”

The RIAA should already know this (and hope that you never do so), but there are ways to strip the DRM from the tunes you download from Ruckus (without taking a microphone and recording whatever comes out of your computer’s speakers). Tunebite, for instance, re-records your DRM-protected songs in high speed and converts them to unprotected music files that you can play back on other devices and burn to CDs. Still, even with their “high-speed dubbing” technology, it can easily take hours to “convert” just a few albums’ worth of songs.

I’d imagine that the most commonly asked question about Ruckus is how the service could possibly be legal. Well, it is legal — it’s ad-supported, and luckily, I found that the ads aren’t very intrusive. Firefox users could even enjoy an ad-free experience with the Adblock extension.

As you might expect, removing the DRM from the songs you download isn’t exactly legal, but only your conscience could (or will) stop you from doing it. The RIAA definitely wouldn’t be happy if you did it, but nobody likes them anyways.

Oh, and that third catch — Mac users are initially out of luck. Because of the Windows Media DRM, the download client is available for Windows only. If you remove the DRM, though, the songs suddenly become playable on Macs (and iPods, and basically anywhere else music files can be played). Man, the reasons to rid the DRM are piling up….

Overall, Ruckus sounds like the perfect thing for college students (and priveledged high school students like us who have .edu emails). According to the Daily Illini, though, Ruckus actually started three years ago. It was originally a paid service available only to students of the 100 or so colleges it was partnered with. Back then, it wasn’t such a big deal, and students generally weren’t very interested in it.

Even though their basic service is now free, it’s unclear to me whether students will actually care much about it. I’m sure the majority will appreciate the free songs, but be turned away by the fact that the songs won’t play on their iPod. For those students without iPods and those that just want to listen to songs on their computer, though, this is seriously awesome.

And for those who have an iPod but also find out about Tunebite (and can wait overnight for downloaded songs to un-DRM-ify), they’ll never need the iTunes Music Store again!

Needless to say, the Gargoyle cannot be responsible for whatever you do with Tunebite, mmkay?

Mmkay.

—Jason He