Hi J River,
I have about 50 CD's that I ripped in wma7 format in old MJ7 days when you were still connected to CDDB. Those are very personal CD, not very widespread and I had to enter all the artist/album/name information by hand. So it took me quite a while to do that.
Now I am thinking of re-ripping them to ape format, but although the ripping is flawless, retrieving information is a crux. Because all the info is in the main database and in this database only. And MC does not know how to retrieve information from there.
So when I insert one of these CD's I always get the screen to submit infos to YADB and if I deny, I get those ugly Unknown artist/album tracks # .
Sure I submitted all those stuff to YADB and in a way it works. I allow to rip with Unknown artist/album track info. Once ripped I retrieve with "Lookup track info from YADB" and I get it. But if I reinsert the CD to rip again, then it again finds the Unknown artis/album/track info.
I created a view scheme to make the CD database visible (once named removable) and there is plenty of unorganized stuff there, plenty of "Unkonwn".
If you edited quite a lot of info in the main database, then all this stuff from the CD database is not any longer in sync with the main database and in my opinion pretty useless.
I think a synching between the main database and the CD database would be useful, so that information entered in the main database long time ago (and never submitted to YADB) could be retrieved, if you want to re-rip a CD to another format.
Also there are personal CD's (compilations, private stuff) that you simply do not want to submit to YADB. These things are not properly taken care of. If you decide to re-rip one of those CD's, you are simply lost. I feel as a user you should have a choice not to submit something to YADB and still being able to retrieve this information in a proper way.
Of course, nowadays I rip everything in ape format, but formats change as quick as the underlying medium that stores them. 5 years ago mp3 was the only format player, nowadays there are plenty and re-ripping could be a mayor issue for many that have old stuff stored.
So I would ask you to consider this a little bit more, or if not give some sound advice on how to do this with the least effort. Remember the information is in the main database (Default library), but nowhere else that it could be retrieved while re-ripping a CD.