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Diyalah

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 14, 2008
4
0
Okay, so if you are the sort of person who wants to spend a lot of money on B&O products, chances are you into tech design, and chances are that you're going to be a mac-user. B&O recognize this and in the catalogue all their speakers and such are hooked up to macbook pros.

Now I know that itunes is not especially friendly to non-mac products at the best of times, but I have never seen my mac crash quite as badly as it did when I tried to connect my serenata mobile phone to itunes....!

B&O issue a patch that supposedly makes the mobile compatible with itunes, but this seems to be a superficial compatibility at best.... for instance, there is the technical stuff, i.e. that itunes will not sync music covers or playlists (for that you need a PC) which B&O is aware of. However, there are other problems - the phone seems to have a random tolerance for music uploads, so, say, it will take 36 songs one time, and then you have to connect it and let it sit for a minute, and then the next time it will only take 5, but the next 40. From time to time, itunes will have a HUGE strop and the whole thing will crash entirely. When the music is uploaded, it also seems pretty random whether the phone will recognize the track or not - it will upload a whole album, but half will be listed as "album/artist unknown," or just not get uploaded at all. And then other times it will have uploaded a song but fail to list it in the music library.

The question, really, is whether itunes or the mobile (or indeed both...) are responsible for the problems? Are there any other people out there who use the serenata with itunes, and does it work for you?
 
Apple is not going to help you with iTunes sync to a device they don't support. While there could be a problem in iTunes, they are not going to be interested if it's not a regularly supported device, and I doubt B&O has worked with Apple.
 
That sounds fair I guess. How rubbish though. I don't think B&O should be able to claim that a product is compatible unless they really know that it is. They have their own product, beoplayer, which as far as I can tell doesn't work on macs either. I don't know anything about the rules for writing software for macs, but I don't see why they can't have a program that runs on OSX and that you could use for syncing the phone in lieu of itunes.

Personally, though, I resent the fact that since switching to macs/itunes a couple of years ago I have been forced to buy ipods because they're the only thing that will happily coexist with my system...
 
It's not really a question of programming on a Mac. Apple considers the iTunes interface details as proprietary information and they don't give it out easily. While it is possible to reverse engineer the interface details via test equipment, that doesn't mean it will work all the time. Sometimes you can figure it out (you think) then Apple makes a small change in iTunes and you are up the creek again.
 
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