Thanks for your suggestions.
Hmmm. A bit of a nuisance. Replay gain is more important to me on my iRiver at the moment than it is when playing songs on my PC, so I think I'll use foobar. However sometime in the near future I'll be organising music for dance classes and I had intended to use my laptop with a remote. The fact that foobar overwrites the MC tags is also annoying.
Essentially I will want to have all my music available with gain for personal (iRiver) and public (laptop) use - and this overwriting business makes that pretty difficult to automate: and to sort out what has been tagged and if so how each time I want to copy files over is a major hassle. Perhaps having two copies of every file tagged different ways would be the easiest way to go, ridiculous as it at first appears.
Would be great of course if MC was updated or had a plugin to make it capable to read foobar tags - and perfect if there was the option to tag in other formats than the proprietary... dream on I suppose
...while I'm on the subject of the music for dance classes with the remote, is it just me or is the theater view of MC way behind the rest of the app when it comes to user interface? The way it looks is IMO pretty amateur and the navigation leaves much to be desired too. My idea for the dance classes was to set everything up so that "anyone" could control the music with a remote - but frankly, I can't see that in MC the way it is at present. Nor can I see the theatre view as a user-friendly family interface for accessing media at home.