September 27, 2004

Purdue launches music service for students and staff

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – This will be music to the ears of Purdue University students – literally.

Purdue's music service, Ctrax, which is being provided by Cdigix, is ready to begin accepting subscribers. Prospective users of the service can sign up online.

The service gives Purdue students, faculty and staff access to over 1 million song titles. The service is free to students living in the residence halls who subscribe to ResNet Internet access. These students can activate their service by signing up at the Web site.

Other Purdue students can subscribe to Cdigix for $2.99 per month, and faculty and staff can subscribe for $5.99 per month. For all users, the cost to purchase a song so that it can be shared via an external device or burned to a CD is an additional 89 cents per song.

Vishal Bhandari, a senior in economics from Lusaka, Zambia, was one of the first students to try out the service during a test period.

"I signed up for the service Thursday night, and so far it's been awesome," he said. "The quality of the songs has been great."

The music service works on PCs equipped with either Windows XP or Windows 2000, and it requires Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher browser. Users will need to install software plug-ins provided by Cdigix in order to download and listen to the music.

Steve Hare, associate vice president for security and privacy for Information Technology at Purdue, said that the authentication process provides the status of the user to the company through the use of an encrypted token that is sent from the university.

"The user will need to provide a purdue.edu e-mail address in order to sign up," Hare said.

Because the system is Web-based, faculty, staff and students can sign up on computers that are off-campus.

"Staff can sign up using their home computers and download the music there," Hare said. "Each user is allowed to download their music to three computers."

Sources: Vishal Bhandari, (765) 409-4704, vishal@purdue.edu

Steve Hare, (765) 494-7820, hare@purdue.edu

To the News Service home page