My dealer has advised that nearly ALL of his BeoSound 5 sales have been to Mac users. (!!!) He also advised that the corporate office has advised him that due to the high demand of Mac users they are looking into adding Apple Lossless support. However, they have provided no time frame. 

I suspect that the BeoSound 5 situation has finally gotten B&O's attention that they do indeed have a quite high percentage of Mac users.

Petja,

B&O is already working on a software update. then you can connect a nas drive of a external hdd with a ethernet connection. Then i think you're problem will be solved. They also working on a plugin for windows media player. i guess that the wma lossless format will be supported also.

a little patiente is the sollution i guess

I would like to see your differences between WMA lossless and WAV if that's okay.

When I've compared them, WMA Lossless, ALAC Lossless and FLAC all checksum when reconverted back to PCM waveforms and compared to the original PCM waveform.

Petja,

I am somewhat confused by your post – or perhaps by the technology out there to present digital music files.

You claim that you have 2000CD’s in WAV file format and that studio analysis for you proves that WAV is superior to WMA lossless when played through the BeoLab5’s.

Fair enough.

However, unless I have my math is wrong, a typical CD cut on WAV will be approx 700Mb per disc. Thus I would calculate you need over 1.5Tb to store your collection adequately.

With WMA Lossless, 2,000CD’s would - I estimate occupy 700Gb of hard disk storage. Is this right or wrong? Bits and Bytes and technology is not really my bag.

In either case, if this is correct, it is clearly beyond the advertised capability of the BeoSound 5 from the get-go and I am somewhat trying to figure why you purchased such a machine given such in-depth knowledge of it’s sonic performance yet completely negated it’s basic storage capacity of 500Gb?

I am sure there is reasonable probability that there are a distribution of people out there who have 4,000, 8,000 or 16,000 CD collections who will also be frustrated. However, that distribution will be very small. The majority of BS5 customers (Mac or PC based) will own 300 to 600 CDs and that 256kbs to 320kbs will suffice.

The BeoSound 5 is obviously the wrong product for you.

I sympathise.

10%

Hi - the Beosound 5 microsite quotes an even more conservative number than your 2,000 CDs

(despite saying 'more' I think it means 'up to')

"""""

Hard Disc

500 GB, which gives you enough space to store over 28,000 songs or 1,000 CDs in lossless quality

"""""

And I have a two "songs" in my classical collection that are 54 minutes and 46 minutes long, and 30 that lie between 20 minutes and 30 minutes duration and more than I could bother counting that lie between 10 and 20 minutes in duration.

What am I saying?  

1. measurements like songs are meaningless

2. 1,000 CDs is not a significant number, as I feel my 500 CD library is probably on the low side

Ed-2

Surely with the next promised software version for the BS5/BM5 the topic of disc space will be slightlty irrelevant as this version promises the option of adding networked drives as an input option for the system (much like the functionality available in pre BS5/BM5 BeoPort systems.

For the advanced users with a Media Server concept at home with central storage of media files this will hopefully be the solution to the current idiocy of being forced to duplicate content from the central server storage to the BM5 which today feels like several steps back in development of Media systems.

This should also open up the option of being able to expand the built in harddrive storage with either networked drives as per above of simple add on external drive options plugged directly into the BM5.

The next major software update was mentioned to be available during April and I hate to ask if anybody has any news in regards to this update as I well know that these things can take additional time after testing processes.

//Rolf