[DaveBlake]

@hurricane51 genuinely sorry that you feel "bummed out", and going to choose not to be offended. As the dev that made all the changes to music export if any individual is to blame (or thank come to that) then it is me. Anything you say is in effect directed at me personally, so you may as well be aware of that. I'm also the guy most likely to be able to help.
 

The fact that a change was made and no effort was made to accommodate longtime users who had used the previous procedure is the real problem.
... The new procedure isn't a simple tweak -- it obsoletes the previous procedure in one stroke. Surely there was a way to maintain that option?

Yes, that is what I was trying to explain in my previous post. If you want to continue to only have artist nfo files for album artists (and don't have any collaboration albums) sprinkled along with the media files then you can.
 

Now to address some questions about my use of NFO files. First, it would be great if I never needed them. But scraping, as you well know, is not 100% accurate and sometimes the scraped information needs to be edited. Unless someone advises me otherwise, it seems the only way to do this is with an NFO file. And unless I have been led astray, the NFO file needs to reside alongside the media file.

Yes adjustments to online scraped artist and album data, or provision of additional data for those that the online sites don't have is made via NFO files. However from v18 onwards the artist.nfo and local art do NOT need to be with the media files.
 

On the most recent backup, I chose Separate files for each item, since that's what I had been doing, to generate NFO files. I will take your word that KODI can't delete files, but for many (over 50) of my artists, the artist.nfo file residing in the Artist folder on my media drives was now missing. The artist.nfo files that the export had created had a different date -- the current date -- and a different size from the one on my backup disk.

What you are calling "missing"/"deleted" have actually just been replaced. So the issue is that Kodi overwrote nfo files when you did not want it to do so.

The fact that overwrote when you set it not to do so (do you remember seeing that check box?), and that it didn't export the artist data that you previously had is very odd. I don't understand how that could happen, and have not been able to reproduce it, but if you can give me more to go on I am certainly interested in pursuing it.
 

Now, I don't know why this happened, but clearly the Export, at the very least, ignored the existing NFO files and created its own. I don't want to spend hours and hours going over why.

Shame because I would like to discover how it did something so unexpected, but I can't fix what I can't reproduce.

Anyway to answer your questions:

1. Is it possible to add an option for exporting the way it was in previous versions? In other words, generate artist.nfo, album.nfo, folder.jpg and fanart.jpg to the Artist/Album folder on the media drive?

It is already possible to do this with the availlable options.
 

2. Will KODI continue to look into my Artist/Album folder for the NFO, or will it be ignored?

The treatment of album.nfo and art is unchanged. Kodi will continue to pick up artist.nfo and art for album artists from suitable folders above the media files as a fallback  (providing it does not find nfo files for that artist in an artist folder in the nominated Artist Information Folder).

 

3. Is there a way to export NFO and JPG for a single artist or album without doing the entire library?

No, there is still no facility to export a single item. It is a feature I have thought about adding, but then decided the changes to export were complex enough (!) without adding item selection to it as well. I guess "Make NFO" could be a button on the info dialog.