[DaveBlake]

Although I fail to understand why Kodi converts a multiple artists lists like "Michael Jackson; Diana Ross" into "Michael Jackson/Diana Ross". In my mind should have resulted in two separate entries (?).

Splitting a string into artist names using delimiters is not as trivial as some may think. Although initially the ID3 standard, slash is a poor choice as it appears in artist names e.g. AC/DC. Hence historically Kodi takes space-slash-space as its default item separator to avoid the AC/DC issue. Some tagging software will give comma as a separator, but again this is used in some artist names. Semi-colon seems a better, not in any artist names in the TheAudioDB, but we can never be sure there is no one out there. Ideally "artist1 feat. artist2", "artist1 (mix artist2)" etc. could all be parsed into separate artists, but it gets difficult to be sure you don't mess up some odd artist name.

I think it is a weakness that Kodi only allows for one item separator, but at least it results in predictable behaviour. In Isengard this is absolute, "Michael Jackson; Diana Ross" would be taken as a single artist, so would "Michael Jackson/Diana Ross", only "Michael Jackson / Diana Ross" (note the spaces) would separate artists be recognised. In Jarvis, if there are musicbrainz ids and a mis-match in name count then Kodi does attempt to use other separators to parse the matching number of names. The user can set this single separator to something else to match their tagging, but this is of limited use. Music collections often end up with a variety of separators, or people want to use what other players accept.

I would like to change Krypton onwards to parse names using multiple user configurable separators, with semi-colon and space-slash-space as defaults. If wanted a user could add " feat." to the list. Is that something music users would find an improvement?