According to Ruckus Senior Account Manager Claire Brunton, 1,351 RPI students were registered by the end of the first day of activation and a total of 189,983 music tracks were downloaded. By Sunday night, 2,406 students had subscribed to the service and had downloaded a total of 738,711 music tracks. Brunton explained that “RPI’s uptake has been the fastest at any school Ruckus has ever launched at.”

Many students feel that despite the inevitable first generation headaches and drawbacks, Ruckus seems to take a big step toward the long-awaited, legal, digital jukebox—the dream of having access to the entire world’s music anywhere, anytime, for free, but of course to a limited extent.

The limited number of Ruckus users at RPI often seems to be a concern. “It has a limited amount of slots, and I’m not on campus for too long other than for classes,” said Sundhari Ganesan ’06.

RPI’s contract has a limit of 3,000 users at any given time, and after this fills, people wishing to sign up will be placed on a waiting list. Brunton explained, “Towards the end of December, all of the 3,000 registered students will be sent an email explaining that if they have not been active on their account within one week prior to the start of the Spring semester—their accounts will be terminated and students on the wait list will be entitled to register for the service.”

Being on campus is not a necessity to use the service. Connecting through a VPN client is sufficient when using the service off-campus. Up to two PCs can use the same user account for unlimited downloads from Ruckus.

With i2hub only down for two days, many students have made the final switch to Ruckus. “I plan on using Ruckus to the full extent now,” said Aaron Ide ’09. Other students still critical of Ruckus, however, are continuing the ritual switch to one of the many other programs available as Daniel Ramsey ’08 explained, “I’m now using Free Torrents because Ruckus doesn’t always let you listen to all the tracks on many albums; there is even better service on Rhapsody.” With a growing list of tracks, about 1.5 million are currently available on Ruckus.

For many students, the most bothersome moments spur from the excitement of seeing a track on Ruckus and then a license error appearing. “Ruckus really doesn’t have enough music. I downloaded one song and all it [had] was the vocal, without the background music,” said Destany Eagles ’07. She continued, “I’d just rather not see the tracks that aren’t full music, or not licensed for free use.”

Lisa Pak ’09 commented on the amount of memory used. “I downloaded almost 900 songs,” she said, “and then had to delete them because my laptop seemed to be running slower, and when I checked my memory usage after, it was about 2.0 gigabytes less.”

The Ruckus site also aims to increase a strong sense of a community at a campus, as it allows students to create a profile to share favorite music and other information. Richard Vulencia ’08 described this feature as a “carbon copy of Facebook,” providing exactly the same services.

There were few complaints about the interface program, Ruckus Player. “The only thing I don’t like is the way you have to search for the music on the actual player,” said Antonio Borges ’06.

In order to download unlimited Ruckus songs to an mp3 player, there is a charge of about $20 per semester for “Ruckus to Go.” Many students, however, have already devised many methods to bypass the fees of Ruckus, from rerecording songs on the laptop by connecting the output to the input line to using the now popular converter program simply created here on campus.