Some months ago I bought a second-hand Beosound 2 from eBay. It was equipped with a 2 Gb MicroSD card with SecureDigital -card adapter.

From the very beginning I had a lots of troubles transferring music to it. Files didn't appear on the disk, BS2 wouldn't play them or I couldn't get the playlists as I wanted. I use a Macintosh both home and work (home: MacBook, OS X 10.5, work: PowerMac G4 MDD, OS X 10.4) but also have a home-PC with Windows Vista. The only way I was able to get music to the BS2 was by setting it to Beoplayer mode and transferring from the PC (which was more than annoying since all my music was on the MacBook/iPod). I even tried installing a virtual machine on my Mac (Win XP under VirtualBox, the free virtual machine tool) but that didn't work either (the BS2 showed up in Beoplayer but the music didn't transfer).

Today I (accidently) came across B&O's FAQ about the BS2 and iTunes 9. It tells that the new iTunes 9 libraries don't include the BS2/6 icons (?!) anymore and therefore users must use Finder to move the files. The iTunes plugin seemed to never work in my case (files disappeared, playlists couldn't be renamed, iTunes crashed etc.) anyway so I was more than happy to stop using it! It also cause iTunes to crash anytime I plugged my camera's memory cards in.

I formatted the card (in BS2, described in manual page 10) and set it to iTunes (which actually is the 'Mass storage mode', not mentioned in the user manual, though!), as page 11. I docked the BS2... and the disk appeared on the desktop. There is already a folder called "Music" which is created by the BS2. My first impression was to drag the playlists (folders with the MP3-files) under the Music folder but this is actually incorrect! Playlists (folders) must be placed directly to the root of the BS2 as it can't use subfolders.

Most of my music is in Apple lossless format so I had to create MP3 versions of them (go to iTunes/Settings/Import settings/MP3 (I used 192 kbps which is good enough to my ears) and then selected the tracks, right-click and select "Create MP3 version") then I dragged the files to the folders (playlists) I created on the BS2. The BS2 uses a painfully slow USB1-connection so it takes time to move music in! When the files are copied, eject the disk from Finder and switch the BS2 to play-mode (by pressing GO for three seconds). The BS2 will beep in three-second intervals as it updates the playlist file. Then it should start playing and you have succesfully transfered your music to it!

One nice thing in OS X is that you can change the icon of any disk. Of course I want my BS2 to mount on the desktop with appropriate icon! When the disk is mounted on the desktop, click it once and open the information pane (press Command+I). Open a picture you would like to have as an icon and copy it to the clipboard (Command+C). On the information pane click on the small drive icon on the top-left corner and press Command+V to paste it. Now the drive icon will show any picture you like, I put a BS2 photo to it.)

Hope this helps someone else! The BS2 is a cute little MP3 player with very good sound but the transfer problems have kept me using my iPod instead, perhaps now I can start using the BS2 more...?

Happy holidays!

Thank you for your explanation and the link to the B&O FAQ - it all makes disappointing sense

The peculiarity of needing to have music folders at the root level was always with us - the "operating system" inside the BeoSound 2 is, of necessity, quite small and "simple minded"

Disappearing folders and tracks are most likely caused by unusual names that the BeoSound 2 software can't handle, if you can see them via Finder you may find that changing the name will make it recognisable by the BS2

I long gave up with the BS2 - and someone whom I lent it to never gave it back! - and now use an iPod all the time. I cannot really believe that B&O still sell the BS2 as it gets almost no support. 

I visited the local B&O shop on tuesday and realized BS2 was still for sale. That was my original spark to investigate further on my software problems!

iPod is much easier to use. I have always thought BS2 should have some better way of indicating its status than the beeps (makes the BS2 unusable at night, too!), similar light-circle to the one in the docking base would have been much better.

I still enjoy the combination of A8 and BS2 and it sounds better too, much punchier sound and larger stereo-image (in my opinion, at least). And it has more "resolution" in volume control, I have many tracks that sound too loud even at the lowest volume on my iPod!