[DaveBlake]

currently the artist path is taken as the deepest common path for all songs by an artist. it works well for an artist/album type directory layout, but it won't work very well in general. but that's what my music collection had so that's what i wrote the code to do

So it was you

An artist/album type directory layout is very common, of course the flaw is collaborative albums where there are multiple album artists e.g. "Orchestral works" by "Georg Friedrich Händel; The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock" or "Riding with the King" by " Eric Clapton & B. B. King". You might have a folder for composers e.g. Händel, but The English Concert and Trevor Pinnock will be album artists for albums by other composers. Similarly say you have other albums by Eric Clapton, or B. B. King, wherever you put "Riding with the King" it will screw up the artist art and NFO.

Then there is the question of how to load NFO and art for artists that only feature on songs but don't have an album (or folder), and form v17 where can the composers, producers, lyicists, musicians etc. that Kodi now also has in the artist table, put their NFO file?

As a solution I am considering extending NFO processing so it was more like a general import and can handle many artists in one NFO. Also when loading actually check the artist name and mbid (if it exists) match. It would mean that you can't change artist name (or identity) via NFO, but that could be a good thing. Then the user could set where their multi-artist NFO files are held, in addition to those sprinkled among their music folders. What do you think @spiff?

What I don't know yet is how we check that the deepest common path for all songs by an artist algorithm has failed to find a folder unique to just that artist. The problems all start when the algorithm results in same folder for more than one artist. Store an artist path relationship in the db?