BTW I'm an extreme newbie to all this. Just have to become familiar with MC 20 or 21 concepts and work through them. What's most frightening though, is the possibility of altering something on disk by any action within MC.
While you're learning, if you want to be super extra safe, you can turn off MC's option to write tags to files. Any changes you make will only be made to MC's internal database and NOT written to the music files themselves. Uncheck the option at:
Tools > Options > General > Importing & Tagging > Update tags when file info changes
You can still delete files, but MC will ask for confirmation *and* it will make you select a radio select to explicitly tell it to delete the file(s). It won't happen just by accident. You can also move files around on disk but ,again, you have to choose the file Rename, Move, and Copy tool to do so. So it's very obvious. MC is very safe to your files generally speaking. That's on purpose, as people that like MC really REALLY like their music!
One final query. When will MC 21 be available and what's the possibility of gratis upgrade when it finally becomes available?
MC21 is out right now. At the top of the MC21 forum there's a posting with the latest version. MC21 is very new right now; I think it's only on build #3 or so. So it's going to have some small bugs here and there and might not be quite as stable as MC20. Give it a few weeks and it will be much closer to where MC20 is right now in terms of stability and lack of bugs.
About the license: You're covered if you buy right now, or going forward. Every license for MC sold right now *is* an MC21 license. These licenses also work for MC20. So you're effectively getting a license for the newest product and the current stable product at the same time. MC21 and MC20 are both covered by licenses being sold right now.
Brian.