Well - i've brought a BeoMaster 5 home to use..

I absolutely LOVE the Net Radio, but the problem is my music.

The previous owner kindly loaded a fair bit of music onto it, which isn't all that bad.  However, i have all of my music on my Mac - which has come via iTunes, iTunes Plus and directly loaded and copied CD's.  Some are DRM protected, some aren't.

I've done the BeoConnect, which went perfectly - then highlighted and dragged a batch of random songs from my iTunes and dropped them into the area marked 'MUSIC' on the BeoMaster display.  They transferred without a hitch.

However, little padlocks are on the mpeg 'labels' - and these songs don't even show up when you try and search for them.

As i understand it, these are DRM protected.  So - first question is.. how do i launch a rocket into my iTunes and wipe off all the DRM.  Is it easy?

Secondly - the songs/albums already on there are in wonderfully neat little 'windows style' folders, with the artist name at the bottom. Very twee.  However, when i dragged and dropped from iTunes it just listed them as individual songs.  Will this make a difference in any way to playback and search?

And.. finally.. (deep breath)..  i see that the songs already on there are all in WMA, not mpeg like the ones i dragged and dropped.  Is WMA better? What's the best format, and how can i fire rocket number two into my iTunes library and convert them all to the best format to drag and dump into the BeoMaster 5 ?

I'll forgive anyone who's glazed over - or has already given up as the reply would be too long..  

Lee

9 LEE:

which has come via iTunes, iTunes Plus and directly loaded and copied CD's.

iTunes Plus FAQ

According to the iTunes Plus FAQ you can upgrade your purchased iTunes DRM songs to iTunes Plus DRM-free songs.

(for a fee per song)

Have a go at upgrading one song and see if that gets rid of the padlock

(it will also give you a high quality song)

then calculate how much upgrading your collection would cost ....

as far as I know you can't nuke the collection ... there was an early iTunes work around for that ... but I think it disappeared in the upgrade from iTunes 6 to 7

WMA is not necessarily better, just different.  To my ears, it sounds better than mp3 at lower bit rates, but this difference goes away with higher bit rates (~256kps).  Then again, the WMA could be lossless which is the preferred format for the BS5 because it is lossless, and the only option that allows for gapless playback (maybe WAV does this, but then WAV doesn't support the tags).  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out how to tell if a WMA file is lossless or lossy from just looking at the file.

I haven't found any software that will create WMA lossless on a Mac (you could burn the Apple lossless to a CD, then rip WMA lossless if you have Windows, but what a pain!).  There are programs that advertise Apple to WMA conversion, but upon closer inspection, these only produce lossy WMA (not that I consider my search exhaustive).  I can imagine this could be something Microsoft does not allow.  According to Trip, Apple lossless is supposed to be supported one of these days so I gave up my search for direct conversion and decided to just wait for that - and convert my Apple lossless to high bit rate MP3 (for now).

You should see if there is a newer version of BeoConnect than what you are using...  the 1st release just dumped the songs into the music directory, a later version organized them in artist/album directories.  Either way, the playback is the same.  However, if you need to add artwork, having organized directories means you only need on image for the album which can be placed in the album directory (named "folder.jpg") vs. having to embed the image within the mp3 file (for each file).  This was enough of an inconveniece to me that I re-loaded my Mac music (~500 songs) when the new BeoConnect release came out (last year?).

One other thought - maybe you dragged the music to Finder BeoMaster5 music folder - this is not the way to do it - you should drag the music to the middle of the BeoConnect icon in the dock.  This will organize your music (assuming you don't have BeoConnect 1.0).

Stan

Just want to correct something I said above...  there now appears to be software to convert Apple Lossless to WMA Lossless... although the two tools I learned of in another thread (winamp and dbpoweramp music converter) do not appear to run on the Mac.

Stan