It's been so long since I've played with MC I forgot about installing after restore and/ or purchase. Will I have any trouble accessing the NAS from multiple instances in future? I'm still a bit confused about the best way to attach the cover art. I'm thinking a separate file on the NAS for art only, or is adding the art to the album folder better?
Like Benn said, it is a matter of personal preferences. Since MC13 has now a tool that can move cover art the issue can be dealt later after ripping is finished.
Alex, thanks for your response. I am curious as to why you would rip to wave and then convert. I assume you would go EAC and then delete the original file after converting but why bother? Why not rip to ape and then batch convert to mp3? I've always used secure rip in the past with great success.
No, didn't think about using any external program. I am thinking "green". Why waste processor cycles (and time) for encoding and decoding a compressed format. The ripping, analysis and conversion process would be much faster if the files are temporarily stored in the wave format. In my opinion it would be useful to create a local small MP3 library at this point. The wave files would be eventually converted to the end formats. (Even though wave files cannot hold tags, the library can and the tags will be applied when the files are converted.)
There is the cache option that can "stack" MP3 files under the APE files, but I think when the APE files are on a networked location that may be problematic.
It might be better to use two separate libraries.
One library would access the server (= the NAS in this case), play the APE files and create converted MP3 files to a local folder structure (including the MP3 files that are already on the local drive).
Another library would have only these local files imported. It can be used for playing the files when the laptop is not connected to the LAN and naturally for syncing portable devices and burning MP3 CDs.
As said, I think it might be useful to create a set by step presentation of the complete workflow that I have in my mind, but that is not exactly an easy task.