Quisp - the last I tried to rip with MC was about a month ago.
I want to be able to set the specific target dir for the ripped files. MC wants to "help" by creating dirs for me, based on the tag info it gets from the web.
I don't want a Billy Joel album in a "Billy Joel" dir, I want it in a "Joel, Billy" dir. But if the tags show "Billy Joel", I get a "Billy Joel" dir.
I misspoke before, I use EAC to rip directly to the location where I want the tacks, then I use MC to import the ripped tracks, one extra step and I get to keep my file system exactly as I want it.
pbreet, thanks for clarifying!
So, you create a Joel, Billy folder by hand and then rip to it? If so, you can do this in MC too. As far as I know, there is absolutely nothing forcing you to create folders based on Artist/Album.
Here is what I do. First, I don't care too much about my folder names since I only interact with my files in MC; however if I did, here is what I would do.
1. I create a custom field called "Sort". I use this in all my views since I personally think it is idiotic that artists are sorted by first name.
2. I rip files to the directory I want to use, creating artist/album folders automatically as is the default.
So far, all of this is set up once and totally automatic once set.
Once I have a batch of files ripped, I then copy the artist field to the sort field and go through the tedious process of manually editing this field, but this would be no different than manually creating a folder, accept that you have the added benefit of having access to a custom sort field that you can use elsewhere within MC.
At this point, I'm done, but if I cared about my folder names, I could just rename the files from properties and select the sort field instead of artist for the first folder. Done, and completely in MC.
Smartlists can be created to make the selection of files easier, for-instance, I could create a smartlist that looks for files where the sort field is empty to select files to process.
I realize it is a little different workflow, but once it is set up it works well, unless you don't have any use for a sort field, then I guess it is a good thing that EAC is free.