While there's
clearly demand for downloadable music, there's
clearly not enough of it being funneled to Ruckus Network. The oft forgotten music service -- which
somehow reckoned it could take on the likes of Rhapsody, Apple, Microsoft and countless others in the saturated digital download space -- has officially folded. Quite honestly, we're shocked that it managed to hang on for this many years, though we suppose its demise was always just a matter of time. Ruckus' homepage now directs to the image you see above, giving the four avid users no indication of whether any partial refunds or gratis hugs will be given out. Rest in peace, Ruckus -- we're sure you'll find comfort in knowing that you were already dead to 99 percent of us.
[Thanks,
nizzy1115 and Gabriel]
posted Feb 7th 2009 2:35AM
Funny, I still paid around $100 very non-optional dollars in my student fees for RUCKUS service this semester.
Being a called a "student" is just code for "getting the shaft in every orifice."
curious, how did you find that out?
Schools paid for the service - nobody actually thought it was completely free, did you? It cost the schools money, they had to pay huge amounts per student.
The idea was, it removes culpability from the school if someone is caught downloading something. What a horrible business model - "You need to buy it, or else you'll get sued. Oh, and eventually we'll crash and burn."
I never got why my school bought into it. It doesn't work on Macs, so half the campus can't even use it. The player sucked. I used it a couple times, it was decent for finding some songs, but the selection wasn't that good. And I actually paid for it, through student fees...
Schools stopped paying for it after 2006. There was no reason for any school to pay for it after that point since it was free for any .edu email address.
actually ruckus is very popular at my college (syracuse university) especially after the RIAA sued some of us students a few years back.
the college promoted it as a way to get music legally. i can imagine why: u could use the downloader on a windows machine and re-encode it without the DRM (there are some allegedly legal ways to do this) and use it on any mp3 player.
the music has always been free for us on ruckus btw, so partial refunds wouldnt make sense (whats 50% of $0?)
Use tunebite for to take out the DRM. But ruckus was always very low quality, I won't miss it.
I go to SU too. Are we paying for that service via our student fees?
Well, I can say I'm a little disappointed. If you had a .edu email, you get free legal music. But, oh well.
Not sure what you mean by "four avid users", as my college (Texas Tech) advertises it as the way to download MP3s on the school network, therefore most of the students use it. Believe it or not, it will be missed.
Sucks too, I can't download torrents at school, so other than paying for music I'm locked out. And as any college student knows, paying for anything becomes a chore on a low-to-zero income.
Wow your school internet must be locked down pretty hard. We have no such restrictions and can use 6 gigs in a 24 hour period. between bitorrent, soulseek, and DC++ were covered.
@david
im at WashU in St. Louis and we arel ocked down even harder. we have gigabyte download limites per day as well as no bittorrent, etc. so ruckus closing is a huge deal here.
If you don't mind DRM, and are still looking to get a legal music fix, there's always QTrax...
*Bursts out in laughter*
...Sorry, I just couldn't say that with a straight face.
The only thing that's funny about Qtrax is how relatively unknown it is. Can you really blame them for trying to do things the legal way. When companies like Warner sue the socks off of anyone who attempts to download illegally it's no wonder ruckus didn't make it. I think we will see more companies like Qtrax soon and that DRM will be a thing of the past within the next few years.
or
you could always go to Circuit City and buy some CD's (says with a straight face)
Penn State offered the service to students free of charge. Sorry to see it go.
You were being shafted by Grhaham Spanier, who serves on the RIAA board. He hets $50,000 to show up to 3 meetings a year.
What?! I was just using it the other day! Man now I'm going to have to go back to downloading from bittorrent, I had been using Ruckus and stripping the DRM which worked out great, they had a huge selection and I could always find what I was looking for.
Why is Engadget happy to see it go? The more competition, the better for all users.
Getting paid by Apple
I still have the songs I stripped DRM off of from Ruckus.
Mirakagi.zip worked wonders in a virtual machine.
wow, ruckus was pretty popular at my school. the only other alternative is to aquire free music illegally now? uh oh
To college students: take initiative at your school and create a Direct Connect hub. Our school promotes Ruckus and no one uses it, we all use the hub.
do you have a link to a how-to? i'd love to set up a direct connect hub.
http://www.broadbandreports.com/faq/dc/7._Operating_a_Hub
That should get you started. Our school hub uses verlihub.
This is my cousin's fault. I told him about it and he downloaded 1000 songs in a day. Not only that but he exhausted the service. Sad day for FREE music for college students. I hope we see a replacement soon :(
Kill my cousin on Xbox Live: CRUX MACHINE
Farewell Ruckus!
Pros:
-Free!
-Pretty large mp3 selection
-fast downloads
-legal and free
Cons:
-their ruckus player was absolute crap!
-annoying multiple logins and stuff to actually download the music
But in all I was glad to have ruckus and will miss legal free music.
LONG LIVE SPIRALFROG.com!
Damn someone needs to at least show them a center justification HTML code, I mean at least go out in style. Or not, I'd probably care less lol
It was a free service provides to us students at GA Tech but to be honest, their library of songs sucked big time. Other than the likes of popular artists like PvD, there was barely any representation of the trance and house music genres. I still have one or two of their DRM'ed songs on my old laptop.
Goodbye Ruckus, you shall not be missed!
This is the first time I've ever heard of them.
Same here. We must be old.
I have a VAGUE recollection of them after the RIAA started suing colleges and students for downloading music. Torrents FTW! (if your college doesn't lock them down, that is...)
As a music executive, I can tell you that any digital store that makes us money will be missed. It wasnt a 50% of the revenue money maker like Itunes. It accounted for about 3 percent of our digital revenue. 3% in this current climate is the difference between a good quarter and a bad quarter.
Mike Admani
They folded because they cant afford to use another font besides wingdings.
I'm go to Ferris State University in Michigan. We are a small D2 school, but our student IT department that I work at has been actively been promoting Ruckus for the last 2 years and have seen much of the university switch over to it. We have blocks in place for all major P2P protocols including BitTorrent so Ruckus will definitely be missed. It would have been nice if they would have at least given all the schools some advanced warning so we could get the word out.
You laugh at Qtrax??? Has 3 of the for major labels signed ,(warner only holdout) has free and LEGAL downloads now available and portability to mobile devices within 2 weeks ,How can you dismiss a company thats been working for 6 or 7 years to get licensed ,legal p2p, They have gone against the grain of the music industry and are on the verge of becoming a major player, it is almost done ,it has taken so long because of the music industrys adversion to free, and their hatred for p2p sites but they have finally come around and realized if you cant beat them join them mentality, they are now putting their p2p egg in qtrax's basket , look for global launch of qtrax , with portability to mobile devices, p2p access and multi national launch before end of february 2009 , just in time to replace all you dis placed ruckus users , Dismiss qtrax you say I think you wont ....watch and listen
I'm glad engadget can joke about this! I loved ruckus! All the free tunes i wanted, easy to convert with tunebite to toss on the MP3 player... what a sad day. I guess I'll head over to Qtrax and see what that business is all about =(
You used tunebite? L2 FairUse4WM
This sucked, I used Ruckus on a regular basis because my school is a hound for downloading music illegally. What do I do with the music that I downloaded from Ruckus?
I used to work for Ruckus back in 04. They had a development office in Boston. A very talented group of people and at least in the beginning it was a great place to work. They closed their boston office in in late 05/early 06 (can't remember), and kept their business operations open in VA.
Originally it was kind of a cool concept. You install edge severs at universities, making downloads of the most popular tracks basically instant without using any of the universities internet bandwidth. But it never really caught on and it just wasn't profitable enough to keep that going. They tried the ad supported model (which could easily be removed by modifying the application's GUI xml) and I am surprised it lasted this long.
I have a lot of great memories working there, and its a little sad to see it go. Best of luck to any of the original employees that were still there.
I go to UPenn and they were also pushing Ruckus like crazy for the past couple of years. It was a great service if you were looking for mostly mainstream music. I'm really sad to see it go. O well, now we'll just have to go back to the old ways...
Something about this still seems fishy to me - although maybe I'm just holding on to false hope. The fact that the entire site would be immediately deleted and replaced with a single image on a white background doesn't seem very professional at all, and a company completely closing up shop with no warning (and not even an explanation or apology after-the-fact) doesn't seem quite right. Also, if anyone else looked at the page source yesterday, there was a juvenile HTML error - the tag was missing the closing angled-bracket so it was just "
Apparently Engadget doesn't escape angled-brackets correctly and cut off my message...
What that was supposed to say was the head tag was missing the closing angled-bracket - again, something that doesn't make sense coming from a company that was able to provide a fairly complex web service for years (although it appears to be fixed today). I'm hoping this is just some domain snafu and that Ruckus will come back soon, but I'm just trying to be optimistic.
Also, I don't understand why Darren Murph/Engadget has such a condescending tone towards Ruckus - it's kept me from pirating music by offering a free, legal alternative. But perhaps Darren doesn't know what he's talking about since he suggests "partial refunds" for a FREE service...
I would normally agree with you, and assume some error had happened or a hacker had taken control of the site, but I have also been unable to connect to the license servers today. This to me signifies that it isn't a prank or a mistake, Ruckus is gone for good. The last time I had heard Ruckus had shut down the entire marketing force so I guess it's not surprising that they just decided to close up shop without telling anyone.
My exact thoughts Scott,
I don't understand the condescending tone and the animosity in Darren's article. Apparently, according to him, no company should dare try to compete with Apple. Ruckus just got what they deserved...
I didn't even know Uncle Ruckus had a music service. He probably just used it as a way to give more money to white people, but now that there's a black president he just doesn't know what to do with himself.
I loved ruckus. I didnt mind the music player, and its a GREAT way to stop pirating. Now i'm using Spiralfrog, and so far, so good, but i liked that Ruckus had the player so i could keep all my downloaded music in one place so i could just open it and find my songs quick. oh well.... Ruckus. You will be missed.
I smelled this one coming. They hadn't updated their weekly "New Music List" in weeks. And they sent out a "help us" e-mail months ago asking people to click on their adverts.
I remember when my university gave us Ruckus subscriptions last year.
No one used it because we had iTunes streaming and torrents.
So, very little has changed.
I hate to see it go. I was able to find a lot of underground bands on Ruckus that I never would have heard of otherwise. RIP
The school that I work for went with Ruckus. Guess Student Government will be looking elsewhere.
now, whether students will be refunded, very unlikely. The schools are not likely to be refunded either. There is a high likelihood that the school's SGA had a hand in choosing one company over another, so students should take the issue up with their SGA rep.
hey, i kinda liked ruckus... it was at least an easy way to hear music and decide if you wanted to buy it or not. can't really do that anywhere else without paying money
I loved ruckus! I had over 5000 songs. Is there any way to get the liscence back on them and keep the songs i had previously downloaded?
On the plus side, now it's legal for me to strip the DRM from my thousands of Ruckus songs.
@Jacob: tools mentioned above include Tunebite, FairUse4WM, and mirakagi. Give 'em a googe. Also, a search for Ruckus DRM should turn up some instructions (involving previous versions of Windows Media Player, deals with the devil, and licking your elbow) for removing Ruckus DRM. I don't know if they still work or not.
I have tried FairUseWM, but it will not go through with the DRM removal because it only authorizes the action for legally licensed .wma files. Of course I downloaded my Ruckus songs legally, but now that I cannot access the player and update the licenses, none of these DRM stripping programs acknowledge my files as my legal property!
This is so frustrating! I had thousands of songs waiting to be converted with TuneBite, but I just never got around to it. I was hoping Mirakagi and FairUse would not require valid licenses to strip the DRM, but it seems that they do. Can anyone help me?!