Thanks for ideas.
I've tried renaming or renumbering the tracks in various ways. Anything numeric is either stripped off or changed to what iTunes thinks it should be - in all cases the disc number (1,2 or3) is lost.
Examples: 1 02 - Akt 1 - (Coro, Barnaba), 102 - Akt 1 - (Coro, Barnaba) and the tracks finish up in alphabetical order of the track names - useless! And the ripping process should really generate the correct names withou subsequent tedious renaming etc.
iTunes doesn't like numbers or banned words like 'The' at the start of a name.
I'm going to try identifying the CDs as A,B,C instead.
Actually I've spent hours and hours over the last few months trying to find a decent ripping/cataloguing progrsm and they just don't understand classical music, which generally has no concept of 'songs', 'artists', 'albums' etc. being of much significance.
Explorer would do the job if it played continuously from the selected track. M'soft media player would be OK if it had nested folders/playlists. Media Center is just unusable.
I've also tried Foobar and Mediamonkey with no results.