www.ruckus.com

It's supported by ads, and you have to use their ruckus player (which is basically like media player with a couple ads scrolling at the bottom of the screen, but if it's minimized, it's not a big deal.) They've got a pretty extensive library going on, but not too many Japanese bands (namely our loved indie bands) are on. Interestingly enough, they do have the three albums by Luminous Orange.

Oh yeah, you have to have a .edu e-mail account. Sorry grade-school IM.

Not really a catch. Google "fairuse" and you'll get somethign that can pull off those licenses and give you wma files your itunes can convert to mp3 :3

[quote="Marekenshin"]Not really a catch. Google "fairuse" and you'll get somethign that can pull off those licenses and give you wma files your itunes can convert to mp3 :3[/quote]

The catch is the .edu e-mail address, if anything.

Too bad torrents exist. Otherwise, this might have been useful.

it downloads faster and is legal, so there's zero worries about getting nabbed for pirating when you use this.

Also: Many schools block filesharing and p2p networks... like mine.

There are zero worries about getting nabbed for pirating when you use torrents. Unless you're paranoid. However, I am curious, what are the download speeds?

Also, valid point, Blank.

That's a common misconception; many schools are cracking down on torrent users as they're really easy to catch, it seems. I know that Princeton will nail you for bittorrent use, I know people that have gotten in trouble for it and will lose their internet access here if they get caught again.

The speeds for ruckus are pretty damn good, at least for me.

I seem to be able to download full albums anywhere from 3-10 minutes.

A) SSH Tunnel, HTTP Tunnel, etc.
B) Three to ten minutes? That's a pretty big range. I mean, that's acceptable, but it's not necessarily better than a torrent (especially when you add in renaming/editing/converting). However, not only is there a much wider selection for torrents, you also avoid having to register to a website, being dependent on the functionality of the website and/or its server, and media other than audio is widely available. Then again, for what it's worth, I suppose the site has value if you choose to use it. It's better than I thought it would be, at least, if you can download an entire album in three to ten minutes.

I've never gone over 5 minutes, but I've only downloaded like 5 albums, so I gave it a wide margin of error.

Nah, I've downloaded a large amount of stuff off there,and it's always really fast.