[jmarshall]

So in reference to debug log 2 posted above with the options "Override songs with online information" and "Download additional information during updates" disabled, it cannot reach out to Musicbrainz and ask about the other MBID's it finds. It then lists them as unique artists but all with the same name, I guess pulling from the Artist field. Is this the intended behavior?

Yes, that is intended behaviour. If you tell it to not download additional information, then we deal with exactly what we have. We KNOW they're unique, but we don't have unique names so we list them as best we can.

Could anyone confirm the following?

If a musicbrainz artist id is found in a tag, xbmc will take this id as the correct artist assignment and ignore artist and albumartist in the tags.

Example:
Musicbrainz id 1223 (=The Beatles, just an example)
Artist tag: Madonna
Albumartist tag: Madonna
Album tag: Revolver

XBMC will recognize the artist as The Beatles and the album as Revolver, correct?

If an artist of the same name as identified by the musicbrainz id in the above file (The Beatles) is added, XBMC will not group that song of the same artist with the above artist if no musicbrainz id was found in that song.

XBMC will recognise the artist as having the given MBID and bing named "Madonna" initially. If the MB lookup is done (i.e. if you have online lookups enabled) then it will download information for the MBID and fill in the additional artist metadata. If you also have the "override tag details with online data" enabled it'll override the Madonna with "The Beatles".

If you have another song with artist tag "The Beatles" but no musicbrainz info, then again it depends on the settings: If the two settings are enabled then the artist for the "Revolver" album will be "The Beatles" so the new songs will be grouped with "The Beatles". If the settings aren't enabled, so that the artist name is still "Madonna" then a new artist "The Beatles" will be added without MBID.

i.e. when figuring out whether to add a new artist, given a song:

If there's an MBArtistID in the song:
1. First look to see if we have a matching MBArtistID in the database. If so, assign the song to that artist.
2. If not, look to see if we have a matching ArtistName in the database that doesn't have an MBID. If so, assign the MBID to that artist, and assign the song.
3. If not we have a unique artist, so add it and assign the song.

If there's no MBArtistID in the song:
1. Look in the database by ArtistName. Use the first found regardless of MBID or not.

i.e. We use the data we have as well as we can.