Beolink PC2 & Mac mini working with BM-Link

[SaltineSurfer]

Hey all,

I read a couple of posts on here regarding the BeoPort/Beolink PC2 so I decided to fire up my old Intel based mac mini over the weekend, re-installed Snow Leopard together with BM-Link and blew the dust off my PC2 to see if it still worked.

I’ve got the PC2 box connected into the masterlink connection between my BS9000 and NL/ML converter and mapped N.Radio and N.music on the ML side to NL via the converter… and I’m pleased to say it all works well 🙂

The Mac is running Itunes 10.6 with BM-Link and selecting N.Music from any of my NL speakers sets the BS9000 to N.Music, opens up itunes and starts playing the songs I’ve added to the library from my NAS. I also installed the itunes remote app on my iphone 13 and that worked too for controlling iTunes! I was not expecting that.

For the Net Radio i’ve created a playlist in iTunes called N.RADIO and added stream URLs that I found online from radiofeeds.co.uk. BM-Link references this playlist for the N.Radio streams, and the order of stations in the playlist corresponds to the preset numbers. Changing radio stream is super fast, faster than B&O radio, taking less than a second after pressing the number preset on the remote in a link room!

I was interested to see if the HLS stream format that the BBC are switching to worked in this version of iTunes, but unfortunately it doesn’t. So I had to add their 320k AAC streams. These work and sound great, but are being switched off this summer.

Many of the other radio stations I added offered either an 112k MP3 or 48k AAC stream… I tried both and the Mp3 streams sounded better which I wasn’t expecting.

I’m not sure if upgrading iTunes or the o/s will break BM-Link though. Does anyone know?

I won’t keep this setup running as I have B&O Radio and Spotify on all my speakers, and having the mac mini running 24.7 probably isn’t very energy efficient, but it was an interesting exercise to see if it all still worked!

 

Rob.

[matador]

ebnrob wrote:

The Mac is running Itunes 10.6 with BM-Link […]. I also installed the itunes remote app on my iphone 13 and that worked too for controlling iTunes! I was not expecting that.

Thats interesting because last time I tried, home sharing support was not supported anymore in Snow Leopard for security reasons. That was then the missing experiment in may research on BL3500, Mac-mini and iTunes integration.

So could you please elaborate on your setup, settings and software version.

Side note: funny how people dig out more and more old hardware to play with it !

[SaltineSurfer]

matador wrote:

ebnrob wrote:

The Mac is running Itunes 10.6 with BM-Link […]. I also installed the itunes remote app on my iphone 13 and that worked too for controlling iTunes! I was not expecting that.

Thats interesting because last time I tried, home sharing support was not supported anymore in Snow Leopard for security reasons. That was then the missing experiment in may research on BL3500, Mac-mini and iTunes integration. So could you please elaborate on your setup, settings and software version. Side note: funny how people dig out more and more old hardware to play with it !

Hi Matador,

Mac mini is a 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB

The O/S is v 10.6.8

ITunes is v 10.6.3

BMLink v 1.50.3

PC2 firmware v1.31

I wasn’t able to sign in to Apple when enabling home share and had to cancel that. However in getting that far must have enabled something as I was then able to see the mac mini in the iphone remote app and selecting it then asked for a pairing code. Itunes on the mac then showed my iphone in the left folder structure, I clicked it and it showed me the code to enter. This then completed the pairing.

Ive set the mac to auto-login at boot, just need to figure out a way to load itunes at login next.

Annoyingly though the mac is forgetting the time after being powered off, so I get a warning popup while booting in saying the time is before 2008 and will cause errors. Once it’s connected to the network it then gets the time from the net. There must be a battery inside thats dead.

[matador]

Thank you ebnrob. I’ll try this and will report.

ebnrob wrote:

Ive set the mac to auto-login at boot, just need to figure out a way to load itunes at login next.

Go to General Preference>User and groups and select your main account. Then in the “opening” tab add iTunes. (Names may differ a little sine I use a French OS but you should find your way.

ebnrob wrote:

Annoyingly though the mac is forgetting the time after being powered off.

Thats an usual behavior on a laptop when the battery is dead but I never experienced it on a desktop machine. Nevertheless the battery is a CR2032 and can be replaced. But opening those minis is a pain.

https://fr.ifixit.com/Tutoriel/Mac+mini+Model+A1283+PRAM+Battery+Replacement/1068?lang=en

[SaltineSurfer]

Go to General Preference>User and groups and select your main account. Then in the “opening” tab add iTunes. (Names may differ a little sine I use a French OS but you should find your way.

Thank you for this tip! Ive now got it opening itunes and mounting the NAS music folder share too at startup 🙂

I’m now thinking I could create an os/x virtual machine in virtualbox on my windows server for running this which would save on running costs.

 

[matador]

No, thank you to you ebnrob,

I’ve just tried to enable iTunes remote again and it did work.

I’m sorry I can give the accurate procedure because I did it just like that, without making screen caps. But it’s an obvious path if you’re not distracted by the feeling Apple gives you it’s not supported anymore. Look in the corners, launch the iTunes remote app on your phone and add a new library from there. It will work, period!

Now I need to dig out my Beoport and the 3500 to see how it works all together.
Any useful find will be reported in the Mac/Beoport thread.

Ebnrob, thanks again!

[Author]

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