Update: I'm still stumped, but I just ripped two CDs the old fashioned way, directly to the folders I wanted where I store my media files: /Volumes/5TBLibrary/Music/[Artist]/[Album]. So I guess my external hard drive is read-only Monday through Friday and read/ write on the weekend?
But, when I used MR&C to put the new files in the folders I wanted (to maintain my naming convention), neither disc went where I asked it to go. When the discs ripped, they ripped to:
/Volumes/5TBLibrary/Music/[Artist (first name last name)]/[Album].
First I selected all the tracks on the CD. Then I double checked that MC had retrieved the best cover art from the internet. I filled in missing tag information ([Date], [Genre] typically). Then I <rename> the [Artist] tag from (first name last name) to (last name, first name).
I tried to use MR&C to rename and move the audio files to:
/Volumes/5TBLibrary/Music/[Artist (last name, first name)]/[Album].
When I did that I got this error message about tagging errors and check to see that my files existed, were not read only and were not in use by another program. When I acknowledged the error, the files all reverted back to their original file path. That had happened before and the fix is to use Finder to move the audio files manually, let MC recognize the new files, then delete the duplicate files in the old folder manually. So MR&C isn't working the way it should for me.
Then I thought the trouble might me that I didn't use this rule:
/Volumes/5TBLibrary/Music/[Album Artist (auto)]/[Album]
But I tried that with a couple of individual tracks and got the same error message.
So I have a few albums that do not have an [Album Artist] in the tag information. Is that a problem? What part of MC won't work properly if there is no [Album Artist]?
Weird.