Well, I think I can declare victory. Opened the Sony CDP-CX355 CD MegaChanger on Christmas morning, loaded it and we were off to the races.
Knowing it was coming, I did some pre-work for a couple of weeks prior to Christmas:
1) CDs. I had read that this unit can be finicky and won't play the first track if the disc is a little beat up. The unit will also allow you to skip the first track.
I decided that I wanted to have the CDs available for use in the cars, or as single plays in my DVD player. So to have the CDs available for use and to avoid the "first track" issue, rather than just dump all of my CDs in the Sony, I made brand new copies of each one. Once I pulled the tracks into TOAST (on my Mac), I also pulled over the shortest track on the CD (again) as a duplicate and put it in the #1track position. Took no time at all. Following some good advice I got in this thread (Thanks Andy), I made sure the tray was balanced as I loaded the discs. Once loaded, it took very little time to "skip" the first track on each CD.
The task of burning the CDs was a bit time-consuming, but in adition to the "first track" issue avoidance mentioned above, the process also allowed me to have CDText for each CD, rather than have to enter all of the information using a keyboard.
2) Remote. I set up the MX-700 using a handful of files I got from Remote Central, including discrete codes for On and Off. Made all of my macros and the remote operated the Sony right out of the box. I went back later to tweak, and it's perfect.
So far, I've opted to use a simple 4 column spreadsheet by slot # to keep track of the CDs, but I'll eventually work my way into some kind of a database.
All in all, everything came out very well. Great (and inexpensive) storage solution and I'm already very pleased about eliminating the jewel cases. Thanks for the input you offered and info you provided via PMs.
