After some time not ripping anything, I bought some cd's from fairly unknown artists and ripped them. In my opinion the whole ripping process displayed quite a number of weaknesses that makes ripping more painful than enjoyable. Here the account:
1) As albums are hardly known, MC9 does not find them in YaDB. But instead of offering a form to enter album information, it starts ripping, automatically numbering tracks and naming album and artist "Unknown".
2) So after the ripping was finished I entered information by hand. But now I wanted to update the information to YaDB, but the only place where I can update is in "CD, DVD, Handheld" section. But there the only tags I can find are "Unknown album and artists" and numbered tracks. So it makes no sense to update to YaDB there. But if I switch to Media Library I can only perform a track update to YaDB, but not a CD update to YaDB.
3) If I try to re-rip the same cd, the information entered by hand 5 minutes before is not found. Obviously there is no lookup of a local database and no local caching.
To conclude, I really don't know how to update the YaDB cd database! Or have the two been merged in the meantime?
4) Another annoyance is the following: At the end of the ripping process, MC9 offered to scan the internet for cover art. If no cover art was found the ripping process finished and I had to look for another menu to find the "get cover art from scanner option". It would be nice that MC9 would offer a fallback method: If no cover art found on the internet, get it from the scanner right away.
5) Don't know if this is a MC9 or a scanner software feature. But if I select get cover art from scanner, the DPI and the image size seem to be set by default to 150 DPI and an image of about 716x716 pixels. If I want other values I have to set it for every single cover art I scan - not really nice!
6) If I change tags in Media Library, there is no way to synchronize this information with the Removable CD&DVD Library! Or do I miss something here? So the same album is tagged differently in the two libraries. The way the Removable CD&DVD Library works does not make real sense to me. Or can anybody explain how it is supposed to work.
7) The problem with the Standard Windows XP "Auto-Run" feature has not been solved yet. I feel if MC9 wants to play in the "Premier League" this is a must. Many simple apps that depend on CD/DVD input have implemented this feature, but not MC9! If I set the Windows XP "Auto-Run" permanently to "None", then the "Auto-Run" feature is disabled for all other apps as well. So to make MC9 work properly I have to accept that other apps do not work properly any longer!
So despite the improved look and feel and the new pane driven organisation of the library in MC9.1 (that I like very much), there are still many small details to take care of.