After replacing all of the cover art and correcting the tags, I backed up the BS5 music by connecting an external hard drive directly to the BM5 and copying the files by going into the service mode on the BS5.

Now, it would be nice to keep the backup synchronized via Beoplayer. I connected the external hard drive to my computer and opened Beoplayer in Windows mode on my Mac. I had Beoplayer scan the hard drive. It worked perfectly. The music library in Beoplayer indicated which music was stored in both locations and which music was stored only on the Beosound 5.

Here's the problem: When I select "copy from Beosound 5" in Beoplayer, the files are copied to my computer's internal hard drive rather than the external hard drive. In the Beoplayer configuration, I have indicated the location for saving ripped CDs as the external hard drive. Still, Beoplayer copies files from the Beosound 5 to the computer's "Music" folder on the internal hard drive. Does anyone know how to direct Beoplayer to copy files to an external hard drive? Is this a matter of changing the location of the music library in Windows Media Player?

Is anyone savvy enough with BeoSound 5 yet to know the answer to this ?!  

I have no shame in addmitting i'm not, but someone might?! 

Lee

Is anyone savvy enough with BeoSound 5 yet to know the answer to this ?!  

I have no shame in addmitting i'm not, but someone might?! 

Lee

Unfortunately I don't have BS/BM5 hence my BeoPort is setup accordingly... without it, that is.

The only thing I thought of/imagined is: when you connect an external HD to your PC, wouldn't scanning of portable devices (that's what an external HD is) help with your issue making it visible to your BeoPort? In my setup, you do it in BeoPort configuration menu under Portable devices - sorry, if I'm mentioning things too obvious...

Not sure if location for copying CDs has much to do with what you want to achieve.

Thanks, Saf. You are correct about the way to tell Beoplayer to scan for an external hard drive. It does that well and shows which music is on the BeoSound 5 or on the scanned hard drive or on both. 

The problem is with directing Beoplayer to copy any non-synchronized files from the Beosound 5 to the external hard drive. The default setting is for Beoplayer to copy the files from the Beosound 5 directly to the computer's internal hard drive when synchronizing. This is especially a problem for Mac users because we use Beoconnect to copy iTunes purchases from the Mac OS to the Beosound 5. It would then be nice to easily use Beoplayer to periodically synchronize the Beosound 5 library to the external hard drive to maintain a safety backup.

Another obvious one (sorry - haven't had time to dig around in BeoPlayer to see if there's a better way):  When you open BeoPlayer and connect to the BM5, it "mounts" the BM5's disk on the local laptop.  You could just use Windows Explorer and drag and drop the music folder from the BM5 to the external drive.  Not fancy, but it would be effective (and take a while if you have a lot of music and/or a slow network).

Stan

Unfortunately, that's not practical for music transferred via Beoconnect on the Mac OS. On a Mac, Beoconnect dumps everything into one folder on the BS5 and doesn't organize the music by artist sub-folders. BeoPlayer is designed to facilitate keeping the music synchronized. There just doesn't seem to be a way to change the preferences to make the "copy to" computer library the one that resides on an external hard drive.

Hi Beojeff,

There is now an updated version of  Beoconnect on the B&O website that now creates seperate folders for each album when transferring music. I have tried it and it does seem to work.

Regards

Paul 

Thanks, Paul. I was unaware of that update. That will certainly help. I hope that B&O comes up with a way to create folders for the music that has already been dumped into the common folder from the old version. That really created a mess.

The BeoConnect update will certainly help matters by creating sub folders within the "mac" folder on the BeoSound 5. 

I've been having difficulties copying the "mac" folder on the BS5 to an external hard drive (formatted for the mac and windows). With a transfer time of about 60 minutes, I keep getting an error during the last 7 minutes stating that files could not be copied to the external hard drive. There are 11,700 files in this "mac" folder (which the old version of BeoConnect DUMPED into the folder without creating sub-folders). Could the reason for this be a limit to the number of files allowed in a folder? After having spent months cleaning up the tagging and replacing cover art on the Beosound 5, re-transferring all of the iTunes music from the Mac to the BS5 is not an option. However, I might be willing to re-transfer a portion of those files if that would solve this problem. Any ideas?

If it always fails at the same place, you are likely running into some kind of limit.  However, I believe the theoretical files per folder limit is quite a bit larger than 11K... although I've seen recommendations around the net for trying to keep it under 10K.  Could you're be running out of disk space?  Or, you probably actually have ~22K files since Macs create a "hidden" file for each file on windows which isn't actually hidden.

Have you tried copying 1/2 (or 1/4) of the files at a time?  I have the same problem (although not to the same degree - I have maybe 200 songs in my "mac" folder).  I was thinking of copying an album or two back to my mac and trying to re-load them with the new BeoConnect to see what happens.  My fear is that there might be some kind of iTunes tie-in with BeoConnect so that it doesn't work the same with random files vs. files from iTunes.  However, I'm traveling the next few weeks so I don't know if I'll have time to mess with this - the songs work fine in the BS5 as they are so what is the hurry?

Stan

Thanks, Stan. I wasn't aware that Macs create a hidden file for each file on windows. That might explain things. 

I have plenty of space on the external hard drive, and it doesn't seem to be any file in particular that might be corrupted. It does seem to be an issue with the number of files. I'm thinking of trying to divide the "mac" folder on the BS5 into two separate folders. Another solution could be to re-transfer about 10% of the files using the latest version of BeoConnect that now creates separate folders. The main concern is that I've cleaned up the tags and replaced the cover art from BeoPlayer on the BS5 library. After all that work, I feel insecure not having a complete backup. 

The dumping of all iTunes files into a single folder without subfolders was REALLY irresponsible of B&O.