Often if I get compilations with lookup, it means that the release wasn’t marked as a compilation in the database. I always try to fix that if possible.
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Picard is more aimed at locating whole albums which are already in the database. What you are trying to do is tag a custom compilation. As that compilation is not in the database, then Picard scatters results attempting to hunt down any match that fits the tracks.
What you are requesting is not to return the best match, but instead you want the oldest match for each track
If these “top 100 Billboard” compilations were official then they could be added to the database. But as they come from a dubious source then they are looked at more like a custom playlist.
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Yes, they are a compilation, BUT they are the original songs. I find that most have albums, I just have to do manual searches to find them (and mostly they are in the DB), but a few are different from the album version (ie single versions often were shorter, to fit on a single, while the album versions could be 5 minutes or longer).
Is there a program, like this one, that is better fitted for my needs? Or would it be interesting to do something with the way this program searches for matches?
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Would it be an idea to force people to register the original album, before they can register a compilation? When you add something the DB asks “There are no albums marked as original, is this the original?”. If you answer “No”, then you are asked to add the original before you are allowed to add a compilation. Might be a bit over the top, but it’s kind of annoying with all these compilations for old albums, and no one has ever bothered adding the original.
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“Compilation albums” are just as much valid releases as “original albums”, and the distinction is not nearly as clear as you make it out to be. There are definitely cases where some track appears on a “Various Artists” release before appearing on a release directly credited to the track artist (if such a release ever appears at all).
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What tags do your greatest hits music files already have?
If they do have complex tags then here is an experiment you could try.
Open some disposable song files in a tag editor - see what tags they already have.
Try deleting specific tags.
And then run those partially detagged files through Picard and see what Releases Picard matches them with.
I’d try deleting tags with dates first but, if needed, delete all tags except artist name & track name.
Let us know how much , or if, removing tags improves your success rate.
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Many people do not have access to, or reliable knowledge about, original Releases.
And too, cataloging is surprisingly complex already, without having to determine accurately which is the original Release.
The volunteer Editors here at MB might stop volunteering if they were faced with that.
In general, the approach taken by MusicBrainz is that all accurate data is welcomed.
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Nudge, nudge, nudge 
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If a Release that you know to exist doesn’t exist in MusicBrainz, please do add it:
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/How_to_Add_a_Release
Keep in mind that all information added in MusicBrainz is added by volunteers who donate their own time and effort into both populating and maintaining the data. If you find data missing or wanting in quality, the best way to remedy this is to add or improve the data yourself.
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Been working on this a couple of days now, and have learned a few things.
- Always delete all tags before you start.
- Do a Lookup and move all compilations back
- Do a Scan and move all compilations back
- Do Lookup in Browser for the rest
4a. Find release date (on the web)
4b. Click the artist name
4c. Check albums around the release date
4d. If no albums, check for singles
4e. If no luck, add to the database
As for 4. This could have been made a lot easier if you could sort. I seriously don’t understand why you can’t click on a column to sort it.
In addition: Why don’t it include artwork when you match? I didn’t understand this before I had done most of the job.
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I seriously disagree with you. A compilation album is not the “real thing”. The songs are the same, but not the way it’s sorted, and the album artwork.
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I’ve added one https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/16d77529-991c-4a72-aed3-8d5781ffd62e and also done an edit. It’s a learning thing I guess, to be able to do it better and faster.
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This partially contradicts itself, but I could see how this probably helps in your case 
To understand what I mean: If you do a lookup Picard uses the existing tags as search terms. Especially it uses title , artist, album, tracknumber and the track length (it uses a few more, but those are the ones that commonly are filled in even for badly tagged files). If there would really be all tags removed a search would yield no proper results at all.
Now if you have a collection of random songs from compilation sources with probably wrong or misleading album names and track numbers this would affect the matching to the original release albums. But if a file would have absolutely zero tags Picard falls back to guess from filename. And this is probably what is happening in your case: Tags guessed from file names probably work better than the existing tags.
Instead of your rule of “Always delete all tags before you start” I would say “Always remove all bogus tags before you start”. E.g. if you know the album and tracknumber tags in your files are all bogus remove those, which will make Picard to search only for artist and title. Together with the slider settings you have this can improve the hit rate for albums.
This also clearly shows the strength and weaknesses of lookup vs scan. If you have somewhat ok tags lookup can perform very well, because the tags can indicate quite clearly what release this should be. Even more so if you tag entire albums.
But if your tags are missing or just “Album 1”, “Track 1” by “The Artist” they are useless for a lookup, searching for these tags will not give you meaningful results. This is when you use scan, which looks at the actual audio content. This works really well in identifying the proper recording, but as it has no other information then the audio content it can’t really decide which release to choose from. Actually in the end it still uses metadata comparison for finding the best fit if there are multiple results, but overall lookup works usually better if the tags are not too bad.
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Ok, I should have said “but keep Title and Artist”, which is what I do. The rest will only screw things up when you want to match songs taken from compilations (sometimes quite dubious). 
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@Norse12
What sort of sucess rate for finding the desired Release are you getting when you follow your scheme?
With a little over 300 songs (there are 305 I’ve kept) from 1950 to 1979 I guess the success rate for Lookup and Scan, combined was around 30%. Another 20% if you checked versions and changed to the correct one. Less than 1% false positives (I think I had 1 or 2 that Lookup got the wrong artist on). 20-30% were easy to fix with Lookup in Browser. The rest, around 25% were harder to get. About 5% were really hard, as in, non existent, and I had to add them. 2 or 3 I just deleted because 1. They weren’t really that interesting, and 2. I actually didn’t find much info at all, on the net (Milord by a Dutch artist was one). I also deleted all Betales songs sung by other artists (I have all the albums on CD and prefer the originals over more or less successful covers).
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The group of Billboard yealy chart topper songs that is being worked on in this thread may be strongly related to the group of songs being worked on in thread: “Scans producing totally incorrect results”
The only time i want my stuff tagged with compilation data is when it’s DJ-mixed or there are slight fade overlaps, or live / radio shows etc…
Yeah I’ve been removing all tags except title and artist so I guess for me and my tastes which never got digital releases until years later the fingerprint thing ain’t gonna find the vinyl releases with the proper dates etc… Oh well, c’est la vie.
With much of my vinyl rips I’ve already tagged the main details including cat no using iTunes… I wish I could import all that into the add release forms in clusters… rather than one song at a time.