Bwog on a Budget returns this week with a guide to making the most of your money and music collection. Downloading music can be confusing, risky, and worst of all, costly, so read this guide and amend your ways! Please let us know if we have left anything off the list!

iTunes: The Exemplar
Pros: Like most Mac products, iTunes is incredibly easy to use. If you buy into the whole Mac lifestyle -- i.e. own a iPod, MacBook, MacBook Pro, or any other Mac computer -- downloading music from iTunes' exhaustive library into your personal library is as simple as clicking a button. Also iTunes makes organizing your music or iPod very easy.
Cons: $0.99 per song is about expensive a downloading can get. Also downloading an entire album as opposed to individual songs usually is no cheaper. Furthermore Bwog has yet to come across any iTunes discount subscriptions.

Ruckus: A Case of Extremes
Pros: There are two big ones: Ruckus is totes free and legit legal! Also Ruckus offers video streaming from Ruckus TV.
Cons: There are many. Ruckus is not compatible with Macs or iPods. Yup, Ruckus only works with Windows. Also Ruckus has DRM, which means there is limited player support and absolutely no copying your songs (unless you burn them onto a CD). And Bwog's heard rumors that Ruckus' storage and track system often is quite inconsistent.

If you haven't had the chance to swing by their table for the cookies, stickers and flyers of information out on College Walk today, Free Culture @ Columbia is currently launching CU-LATOR, its new (and cleverly titled) software through its website.

Basically, CU-LATOR is a program designed to encrypt web activity on your computer so that it stays out of the sight of Columbia administration. Although the FCC software is being launched in response to the RIAA attacks, Free Culture founder (and B&W editor) Brendan Ballou tells us via e-mail that it's not about file sharing. "I don't download music -- in fact, a suprisingly small percentage of our club actually does," Brendan claims. "We're really just paranoids, who don't like the idea that Columbia can see what websites you go to, and that that information can be so easily shared with outside organizations like the RIAA, or the government. It's our belief that whether or not you've got something to hide, we all have the right to privacy."

Another interesting bit of information is that CU-LATOR is actually built off software used by Chinese dissidents and is the first of its kind to be used on a college campus, giving possible leeway to a national model of the program. Unfortunately, the software is not available for non-Apple users although one of the club's summer projects include designing a version for PC.

In the meantime, Apple kids should check it out -- you just might thank yourself for it later.

- MIP

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M. Six Silberman, architect of civilizations, plots path to sustainable future: "heinous...labor-intensive...technocultural mess"

PLUS: Yet another reason why we'll never be comparable to Penn...

There's a lot of music out there to rip off--Bwog music critic Bryan Mochizuki gives us the run down on the downloads.

"Careful" — Hot Chip

As I'm writing this, Hot Chip is the 4^th most blogged act on Hype-Machine (Google-sort-of-thing for MP3 blogs) and it's also the 4^th most searched for. They've been somewhere in the top five of both for the last few weeks. Their ability to hold both of these spots is fascinating, because they haven't really done anything to warrant it. The three artists above them on the "most blogged" list are Jay-Z, the Clipse, and Joanna Newsom, who'll all drop albums sometime in the latter half of November. Most of the Hot Chip songs I'm finding are from an album that came out in May. Is Hot Chip really so great that people are still flipping their lids six months after the fact?

No. Yes. Maybe. I'm actually not sure. A lot of what I've sampled seems very consciously "good," like Radiohead if they would have just started with Amnesiac and said, "Look at all this weirdness...wait for it...wait for it...yeah, you liked that didn't you?" This is not to say Hot Chip is anything like Radiohead or even worth comparing to them. But "Careful" just sounds like the sort of weird shit bands do when they are way too conscious of attaining (or attempting) "goodness" — especially when all that weirdness is getting in the way of what is a pretty nice little ditty. Seriously, this song goes from like a 3 to an 8.5 when the band stops circle-jerking on the drum machine and plays it like they're Death Cab scoring a montage on "The OC." How often does that happen?