Tufts will end its subscription next week to Ctrax, a free online music downloading system that gives university students access to over 2.3 million songs.
Ctrax is set to go out of business shortly, ending its three-year run as a major provider of digital music to college students. Tufts will cut its ties to the company on March 1.
In lieu of Ctrax, Tufts will encourage students to use Ruckus, another legal, free music downloading system. Ruckus is available to all college students with a valid educational (.edu) e-mail address, and universities do not need to sign up or pay for the service, as they do with Ctrax.
"The services are very similar," Tufts Online supervisor Judi Rennie said in an e-mail.
"As for how [the switch] will impact our students, I'm hoping it won't," she said. Rennie said that the change could actually be an improvement.
"The feedback I've heard is that the Ruckus interface is a little more intuitive," she said.
Free downloading with Ctrax and Ruckus is legal because it is "tethered" downloading, meaning that users cannot put the music they access onto CDs or portable devices like iPods. What they download can only reside on their hard drives.
"You can download it and listen to it, but you don't really own it because you can't burn a CD with it and you can't put it on a portable device," Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman said. "It's like previewing it, but it actually resides on your hard drive."
If students wish to completely own the music, they can buy the files from the program. They can then put the songs onto portable devices or CDs.
Sophomore Samriddhi Bhalla said that she had difficulty using Ctrax last year and welcomes the switch to Ruckus.
"I was trying to sign up for [Ctrax last year] and they said they'd send me an e-mail," she said. "After one month, randomly I received an e-mail. And I tried using the username and password that I was given, but it didn't work."
Bhalla said she would be willing to try Ruckus. "I would try it, but it would definitely need to be easier [than Ctrax] to sign up for," she said.
Freshman Becky Baumwoll has used Ruckus since last fall, and she praised the program.
"I think it's a really good program," she said. "They have a lot of underground or less popular music. When I get a magazine ... like Vibe, I'll just go through it and download all the music I see there."
In doing so, she said she can listen to the album and decide whether she wants to buy it.
Baumwoll said that she does not find Ruckus difficult to access. "I went on and I gave my e-mail address, and they have let me use it," she said. "They let you use it right away."
Ruckus also boasts a larger music library than Ctrax. Ruckus' users have access to approximately 2.5 million songs, Ruckus Director of Corporate Development Chris Lawson told the Daily in an e-mail. Ctrax, on the other hand, offers users about 2.3 million songs, according to the program's Web site.
Beyond that, Lawson said that Ruckus is a better social networking tool for college students than Ctrax.
"Students can create profiles, connect with friends, share playlists and recommendations, read reviews from other students, and always stay on top of the college music scene both on campus and across the country," he said.
Unfortunately for many Tufts students, neither Ctrax nor Ruckus works with Macintosh computers. "Apple continues to control the production of chips in a way that anything other than iTunes is not going to work with iPods," Reitman said.
Ctrax is provided by Cdigix, a digital media program for college students. Cdigix also offers a program called Clabs, on which students can access a wide variety of educational media that they can use for their classes. Cdigix will continue to run Clabs, the educational media component of its business, after it cancels Ctrax, the entertainment media component.
"Over the last few years a number of factors have gone into [Cdigix's] decision to focus exclusively on its educational platform, and not continue with its music service," Cdigix press representative Laurie Rubenstein said. "Those factors include feedback from administrators and hearing that what's most important to them [is] delivering educational media."
Rubenstein said that student demands and legal issues also prompted the change.
"Another [problem] is that there are a number of challenges that still exist within the music industry. Students want their music on multiple platforms - to be able to transfer their music onto the personal device of their choice ... There are a lot of reasons why - because of restrictions put on music services - it is difficult to continue to pursue that platform," she said.
Ruckus used to cost money, as Ctrax does. When Ruckus started three years ago, "the service was only available to students at schools that we had partnered with," Lawson said.
This partnership cost either the student or the school a small fee. The fee, he said, amounted to $3 per month.
As of Jan. 22, 2006, however, the service has been available to all students nationwide with a valid e-mail address issued from an educational institution.
"It is a very exciting time of growth, because now any student can share the service with their friend regardless of what school they go to," Lawson said.
