[DaveBlake]

But just need to have a way to handle the non-unique artist names, and also names that don't make acceptable folder names. MusicbrainzID is unique, but does not make a human friendly folder name.

Could you concatenate the artist and musicbrainz id?

I guess that could be an option, so artist folder is either
<nominated artist additional data path>/<artist name>
or
<nominated artist additional data path>/<artist name>-<MusicbrainzArtistId>

or could have subfolders
<nominated artist additional data path>/<artist name>/<MusicbrainzArtistId>

But I do wonder if we could hit folder name length limits with a long <nominated artist additional data path> path and artists like "The Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir" - although I'm pretty sure that is a unique name that would not need the mbid appended!

But the key idea is to normally have the music files elsewhere, this avoid the "collaborations issue" of having albums by artist1, albums by artist2 and an album by artist1 and artist2. Hence maybe

PHP Code:

-<nominated artist additional data path>
---U2
----------artist.nfo
----------extrafanart(folder)
----------banner.jpg
----------fanart.jpg
----------folder.jpg (artist thumb)
----------logo.png
---John Williams
----------53b106e7-0cc6-42cc-ac95-ed8d30a3a98e (folder)
--------------------extrafanart(folder)
--------------------artist.nfo
--------------------banner.jpg
--------------------fanart.jpg
--------------------folder.jpg (artist thumb)
--------------------logo.png
----------8b8a38a9-a290-4560-84f6-3d4466e8d791 (folder)
--------------------extrafanart(folder)
--------------------artist.nfo
--------------------banner.jpg
--------------------fanart.jpg
--------------------folder.jpg (artist thumb)
--------------------logo.png 


But the <mbid> part is still not nice for the user to know which artist is which at a glance. Humans would be better with some disambiguation text e.g. "Classical guitarist", or "Film Music", or perhaps nationality or date of birth. For Kodi any appended disambiguation would need a clear separator that is never part of a name, otherwise when does the name stop and the disambiguation text start?

Although, what then happens if a library is not tagged with musicbrainz? Could you use an AudioDB identifier instead?

Kodi's ability to handle artists with the same name is based on having Musicbrainzid, and TADB contains a subset of MB data e.g. every entry in TADB has a Musicbrainz ID. So no mbid, artist name has to be unique with your collection.

And of course, if an artist name is unique within your collection (across all musicians, producers, mixers, song artists etc.) there is no need to worry about any of this.

If you want to mix art, nfo and music, using the same <artist name> folder hierarchy for all of it then that is fine too, it just won't be madatory.