[distances]

> so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century.

It's easy to see which bitrate a track/album has, you don't need to keep dates for that? What's harder to see is what encoder was used -- modern LAME at even 128kbps is a totally different game than some 90s Xing or Fraunhofer.

Better would of course be to have lossless files of the originals and mass convert to mp3 when needed, but I suppose that's a different discussion.