Puncher, upon purchase of the BeoSound 5, your dealer will send your entire CD collection away to be ripped and have a backup file made, either onto a seperate hard-drive or USB device.

The only reason you would need an editing PC is on occasions in the future when you need to rip a new CD that you have bought.

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Villette010:

Puncher, upon purchase of the BeoSound 5, your dealer will send your entire CD collection away to be ripped and have a backup file made, either onto a seperate hard-drive or USB device.

The only reason you would need an editing PC is on occasions in the future when you need to rip a new CD that you have bought.

For a fee or free?

I can't imagine someone walking in to the dealer with couple of gym-bags filled with thousands of CD's to be ripped. In Lossless format, this will take days. 

I at average buy about 2-5 new CD's per week. This would mean I need a computer hooked up to the BS5 at all times.

The more I look at this thing, the more sorry I become. It's a miss.

I wonder if the rumor that the average B&O owner listens to only 6 CD's is actually true.

bayerische:

For a fee or free?

Have you ever seen a B&O doing anything for free??? They ask you to pay to configure a remore you've paid 350 pounds!

bayerische:

(...)In Lossless format, this will take days. 

There are services that do this already, it is not your B&O dealer that will do it with his little fingers!

The way these services work, is they scan the barcode of your CD and if they have already ripped your CD in the past, they just have it already in their database. They would really rip a CD that they do not already have in the past and then they would keep a copy.

I am not sure I would let royal mail transport my whole collection... as lose it. 

p.

The whole idea sounds stupid. I would never hand over my CD collection to B&O, have them forward it to some third party, shipping back and forth and paying a monstrous fee I'm sure.

B&O found more attractive to use Window XP embedded to manage Beosound 5. I'm just wondering how will be the support in 10-20 years when Microsoft will stop to support this version of Operating System.

 I believe this product will not stand as long as the others B&O products we knows or through many versions over years.

 They go too far with PC industry technology in my opinion by using USB 2.0 in example who will be replaced soon by USB 3.0.

Technology moves very fast. There are huge progress made in other fields as well, like screens. It is likely that any device that B&O makes will not last as long as they used to be.

PhilLondon:

Technology moves very fast. There are huge progress made in other fields as well, like screens. It is likely that any device that B&O makes will not last as long as they used to be.

You are right.  Technology does move fast.  The upgrade cycle will probably be more like B&O flat panel TVs.  Over the last 5 years, B&O TVs changed rapidly.  Although I think I like Beosound 5, I still remember being told by B&O that the hard disk on my Beomedia 1 could not be upgraded to a larger capacity drive because of the differences between the original BM1 and the later BM1. Also it took them a week to figure that out.

I think B&O hopes that most customers for the BS5 will accept that it is a cool looking digital music player and internet radio device.  Sales persons at B&O may not even mention that it is a Windows XP powered media server but rather that this is a must have device with the latest technology. The design of the Beosound 5 controller has been described in some media sources as futuristic.  I am sure this will be fine for most people.  I don't know this as fact but I would surmise that most people think that replacing their PC every 5 years is cutting edge. Of course this is not the typical Beoworlder which is probably why we have intense discussions about a product that nobody can buy at this time.