Ruckus Closes Down 125
An anonymous reader writes "According to TechCrunch, Ruckus, the ad-supported music service targeted at college students, has closed down for good. Ruckus was notable for its poorly-designed client software and .wma-only DRM-laden catalog of 3,000,000 tracks, somewhat less than half the size of the iTunes catalog."
Re:Never used it. But... (Score:5, Informative)
First time I ever heard of it (Score:3, Informative)
If it was aimed at college students, they did a poor job of advertising it (using Pandora here).
Re:The news item is rather subjective though. (Score:3, Informative)
Whole news item summary sounds like an Apple troll.
I disagree. If you've ever used Ruckus, you can't say you liked it. Most of iTunes is DRM-free now anyways. The only reason Ruckus got any popularity was because it was marketed to college campuses as a safe alternative to file sharing. Naturally, paranoid campuses (such as mine) promoted it heavily, trying to keep the RIAA off their backs.
Re:Never used it. But... (Score:3, Informative)
You still have to install a newer version of Windows Media Player than the default. On XP it comes with WMP 6.4 which doesn't have a lot of functionality. WMA DRM works on a lot of different PMPs; however, it doesn't work equally well on all of them or as well as FairPlay works with iPod. That's the main reason the iPod is more popular; it just works.
Re:Uhhhh.....free? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Uhhhh.....free? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, we all hate the DMCA, but I don't think a court has ruled on whether it is illegal to take DRM off of a legally purchased file. Remember, the law is what the courts say it is, not what the legislatures say it is.
Re:The news item is rather subjective though. (Score:2, Informative)
If you've ever used Ruckus, you can't say you liked it.
That's for sure. If it were just graphical ads (even animated images), it might've been tolerable. With all of the flash and audio-enabled ads, it was just too much. And the audio was usually on by default, meaning I had some random internet lady talking to me while I was trying to check out some music.
That's not to mention the player, which was a little lighter on the ads (you had to go to the website to select any new music, so most of the ads were there), but for some reason always consumed all available CPU power (this is on a single-core CPU with HT, so it is pegged at 50%). It was not only difficult to use, but also made the computer almost unusable.
I am not going to miss it, but I have a few less technically-minded friends who, despite their occasional frustration with it, will probably be sad that it's gone.
Point of Awareness (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Never used it. But... (Score:2, Informative)
"Remember WMA DRM = Doesn't work on iPods."
lol, everyone uses Zunes, who cares about iPod. Also everyone uses Internet Explorer. And Windows.
It didn't work on Zunes either
Re:The news item is rather subjective though. (Score:3, Informative)
I thought colleges bought subscriptions for their students, not just promoted it.
No, they bought it on behalf of their students, and lumped it into their tuition, along with those big paychecks for the administrators.
Once they set up an account "on behalf of the students" and said "here, use this", they didn't give a shit one way or another, since if the RIAA started badgering them, they could point at that and say "We're not culpable, we tried to do it your way". Of course, they're not doing it to protect the students, they were doing it to protect their own asses.
Re:My uni apparently didn't get the memo (Score:1, Informative)
Cornell is one of the universities that promoted Ruckus. The main student-run newspaper had an article on it today [cornellsun.com] where they say their interviewers asking about the university's response was the first the university officials had heard of the news.
Helping you understand (Score:3, Informative)
I'm happy to help you understand the things that seem beyond you.
Apple is not on your side, they only care about increasing revenue and profits just like any other monolith.
And (shocker) it turns out being customer friendly (as in forcing studios to give up DRM) brings more profits to Apple! Duh! Just because that's a primary motive of Apple does not mean the end result for you the consumer is the same as if they "were on your side". If your side is one that brings a company more profit, then in fact they are driven to be on your side. You just have to know what they consider profitable to understand if the actions they take will be agreeable to you.
Also, you made that last part up completely.
He described how the system actually works, rather the opposite from "made up".
Explain how a DRM scheme works that doesn't require some verification system, please I'd love to know.
See, here's the part where you need to learn to read more carefully. He didn't say there was no verification system, just that once you bought the music it did not need to contact Apple to work (and here we are talking about the legacy DRM music stuff, not the majority of Apple's music which is now DRM free).
The reason is that with the Apple DRM, your whole computer is authorized to play the DRM files you receive from Apple.
Thus you can buy a song, it's downloaded to your computer with the DRM wrapped around tailored to the authorization from your computer. You can play the audio/video file until the end of time with no network connection. If you like, you can think of it as your own computer being the authorization server.
Similarily, devices are authorized and the same holds true there - music sent to your device works there as well indefinitely, with no network connection.
Apple saves a ton of headaches and money not having a DRM authorization server that has to be up 24/7 in order for people's music/video to work, by authorizing up front they scale the load back to a single effort instead of repeated requests (almost true, since of course from time to time you may need to authorize a new computer or device but it's still basically O(1)). There's that whole "company saving money is the same as your best interests" thing again.
The patronizing tone of this reply is brought to you by the arrogant tone of yours.
Re:Uhhhh.....free? (Score:1, Informative)
The licenses lasted around three weeks before you'd have to check their servers and renew them
What took so long? (Score:3, Informative)