Mac's and Ruckus?!?!

Hey guys, there's a program called Ruckus for students which allows students to download music for free. I went to ruckus's website to see if they support MAC OS's, and apparently, they do not support MAC OS. I was wondering, if I used bootcamp to get XP Pro on my mac, then installed Ruckus on the XP Pro, would I be able to transfer the files straight over? I think I remember reading somewhere that you are able to access the Windows Files while in OS X.

Thanks.

-larson

 

You can do that with Parallels. In Parallels, you run Windows inside a window on Mac OS X, and you can just drag a file from the Windows...window and onto the Mac desktop.

Parallels is the other way of running Windows on the Mac. The advantages of Parallels is you can run both OSes simultaneously, and when you need that "occasional" Windows application you don't have to reboot into Windows, you just open up Parallels. However, Parallels will take up more resources than running Windows via Boot Camp, as it has to run both OSes.

 

But even so, I read somewhere that you are able to access both Harddrive's with bootcamp while on the OS X. Maybe it was Parallels, but I could have swore...

 

No idea.

But Larson, buddy, one punctuation mark a the end of a thread topic is enough mate. I mean, glad to see you excited...

 

meanie .

lol !!!

 

You are able to access both your OS X HD and your Windows XP in OS X if you Boot Camp, so you do not need to worry about that. The benefit of Parallels would be that it makes it much more convenient to run Windows programs, as you do not need to restart.

 

i told you he was evil!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

It should be able to work. Like what Sam said, just drag it, and it will do it for you. That's the neat thing about the Parallel software.

 

It won't work because Ruckus uses Windows DRM to limit your usage of the files. You may be able to see them in OS X, but most likely you will not be able to actually play them. Ruckus requires a Windows Media Player backend which is probably why it doesn't work on OS X.

 

yeah you could transfer the files to osx easily.

itunes will not play them. your ipod will not play them. in fact- no portable media player will play them. even the one's compatible with drm music, playsforsure or whatever, because these songs are restricted to your local machine specifically. you can't play them anywhere, share them, burn them to cd's, etc.

only play them on the local machine.

of course, there are ways around this- ultimately there are going to be ways to convert the files to mp3's in both windows and osx.

however- you will lose sound quality during the process, and these songs are already 128 kbps wma - the very low end of the reasonable sound quality spectrum. any lower and a discerning ear will be upset. you really dont want to lose any more sound quality at all or you will start hearing weird artifacts.

i think its a great tool to sample music though! i would not want to build a collection off of anything with drm though. it sucks. immediately after downloading the songs, about 10% of the drm keys failed with ruckus, and they were unrecoverable. its bad stuff, that drm. expect songs to break all the time.