Ruckus, which was once a source of free music in a legal way of obtaining it and was based on advertisements. The way that I was introduced to Ruckus was through my University and I found it to be a pretty good service even with the DRM protected content.
Over the weekend, however, I found that upon visiting Ruckus.net I was greeted with an “Unfortunately the Ruckus Service will no longer be provided” message.
At first I thought I must be at the wrong website, maybe a fake one. Nope, it’s true and it was for me without warning.
Oddly enough, I had just used the service on February 5 and it turned out that the very next day they closed their doors.
For those of you who spend a lot of time building a DRM protected library in Ruckus, I’m sorry to say that your music will slowly become unplayable. Your best bet is to find an alternative or get to cracking that protection as soon as possible. 😉
I turned to a service that I had looked into in the past, but never got around to trying. SpiralFrog will hopefully be a good replacement to Ruckus for me, but so far I’ve been disappointed to say the least with their song and artist selection of available for download tracks.
Another thing that I dislike about SpiralFrog is the fact that the download manager seems to only handle one song at a time and is fairly poor at doing even that!
Ruckus was capable of downloading multiple tracks at once and downloaded them very fast through the client which was a download manager and player all in one (a long with the advertisements).
Are there any other good alternatives that I should look into that are legal and free?