Thanks for your time and help. I really appreciate it!
I rip all of my CDs to a folder I labeled New Rips on my iMac internal hard drive because it rips faster and I actually make three copies to three different hard drives (the Mac Mini's external drive, which is my music server, a USB flash drive to take to my work hard drive, which is essentially my backup copy, and to a NAS drive on my home network. I do know that I could just rip to the Mac mini or the NAS and then copy to the external drive on the Mac Mini and save a step but for ripping speed I do it the other way. I also know I could use the NAS library as my library for J River, but because of occasional network dropouts, potential hard drive failures, and planned redundancy, etc. I prefer to use the external drive as my source for the music server. I don't always do the copying at the same time, but when I have made all three copies I then delete them from the new rips file on my iMac.
Anyway, the output directory under XLD is "same as input" and the File Naming is "default". I never altered it when I installed it. Perhaps these are not the correct settings?
I do auto import with J River and the path is volume/external hd/digital music files/.
When I add a new file to the external hd, if it is a new artist, I drag the artist folder, which contains a folder with the individual album, into digital music files (artist/album/aiff files). If I already have that artist, I drag the album folder into that artist's folder (album/aiff files) in digital music files.
One thing that I started to do differently a while back, come to think of it, is actually creating individual folders to rip from XLD into that is specific for that album, i.e. new rip/artist/album rather than just new rip folder. This allowed me, as I added new artists to my library. Before that the filepath would end up as new rip/album and I would manually create the artist folder on the hard drive or copy into that artists folder if I already had an album by that artist.