What do you call a music store that offers half of the music iTunes has available for download, wrapped with Digital Rights Management restrictions, works on a limited number of portable music player, only runs on a Windows-based PC and has a shaky business model that relies on online advertisements?  Ruckus.Funded by venture capitalists with the blessing of the Recording Industry Association of America, Ruckus was supposed to cause a ruckus on college campus by giving away free music to students.  The premise is that if they can give music away in small doses, students will buy music legally and stop obtaining music from services like Limewire and The Pirate Bay.It never will.So before you decide on trying Ruckus, keep these options in mind as there are some restrictions to the service.First, you must use Windows XP or Vista to run the service.  Apple users can use either parallels to run Windows virtually or partition a Windows using boot camp.  Second, all the music downloaded is wrapped in DRM.  It’s very hard to explain what DRM is, so here’s an easy version:  It restricts how users view their files.  Take for example a song downloaded from iTunes.  It can only be viewed on iTunes and on the iPod music lineup.  No Windows Media Player.  No Zune.  Nothing!  Because Ruckus uses Windows Media Digital Rights Management and not Apple’s DRM service called FairPlay, it won’t work on the iPod line.  Most importantly, Ruckus only supports a limited number of music players.  It’s hard to tell which music players are supported because Ruckus doesn’t have a support page to find this out.Microsoft doesn’t offer any help, either.  If your music player is supported, transferring your music to your player is not free.  The service costs $4.99 a month or $20 per semester.Aside from the music restrictions and the limited support of the music player, the service is decent.  Ruckus Networks claim to have 3 million songs available to download — well short of iTunes’ 8 million songs and Amazon’s 3.1 millions songs available for download.  Ruckus does have current hits available for download: like Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida”, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and Jesse McCartney’s “Leavin'” are all offered but other genres depend on what’s available from the record companies.  Ruckus does have music that other music stores do not have — Def Leppard, is not available on iTunes or Amazon.  Ruckus also has a movie download service, but it mostly contains music videos, movie trailers, Web episodes and independent films.  Don’t expect full-length movies like “The Dark Knight” and “Sex and the City” to appear any time soon.    Ruckus encodes the music at 128Kbps and 192Kbps and uses the Windows Media audio format.  While it’s not considered CD quality sound, it’s better than the 128KBps Apple uses to encode some of their music.  It does not compare to what Amazon uses to encode their music: 256Kbps and its DRM restriction free that allows you to transfer the song to any music player that supports the MP3 format.  Apple also has some songs encoded at 256Kpbs that are DRM free and some music players support unprotected-AAC but the majority are encoded at 128Kpbs and are DRM protected. In conclusion, Ruckus offers half of what iTunes has available for download, wrapped in restrictions and only works with a limited amount of music players.  While it won’t stop students from pirating music, I will give the RIAA credit for giving it the old college try.—-contact Gregory Schultz at [email protected]