UC Davis Information & Educational Technology

Bits & Bytes

Cdigix Provides Free Legal Music

Published in The Aggie on October 19, 2006

Free Legal Music -- Three words that may induce you to punch the air in triumph at the promise of gigabytes of guilt-free tunes. For many, however, legal music brings to mind crippled files saturated with usage limitations and corporate paranoia. Even with the popularity of Apple's iTunes Music Store, illegal file sharing continues to be a major concern for campus security.

Beginning this fall, every UC Davis student will receive a free one-year subscription to Ctrax, part of the Cdigix media suite, which is the leading provider of digital media services to the college marketplace. With Cdigix, the campus hopes to reduce illegal file sharing and invite students to try out a legal music service firsthand.

The subscription includes unlimited downloads and streaming audio from an extensive two million-track music library containing large discographies from both major and independent labels, including live tracks and rare non-album cuts.

However, the songs you download via this subscription will expire when the subscription ends. To keep your files permanently, you can purchase an individual song for 89 cents or an entire album for $9.99. Songs purchased from iTunes cost 99 cents per song and $9.99 per album.

Ctrax operates over a local area network, so a song takes mere seconds to download. As users browse, they can add songs to a basic play list. It lacks shuffle and queue functions, but will remember song choices after you log out.

Nancy Hang, a Cdigix student-marketing representative, pointed out the convenience and freedom of Cdigix.

"iTunes only provides 30-second sample clips, whereas you can listen to the whole song or album on Cdigix before you buy it," she said.

Hang also cited the higher level of safety and quality of Cdigix compared with peer-to-peer programs like Limewire or Kazaa.

While Ctrax has plenty of benefits, it also has a few hurdles to overcome. Unlike iTunes, however, Ctrax is only for Windows PCs and requires Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. Also, Ctrax will not download directly to iPods.

While the digital rights management copyright restrictions and the inability to download music directly onto an iPod may turn away some students, Ctrax still has much to offer and the one-year subscription is free, safe and legal.

Log on to getlegal.ucdavis.edu and take a listen.

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