you are right. works now just fine in mp3tag. saving it worked wonders 
but, am I the only one thinking displaying the original value means that value is presently stored in the flac file?
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Let me guess. In Picard you had highlighted a whole album of tracks. So the image on the left is showing you that some of the tracks were tagged like that, but others were not.
Edit:
I deleted all the tags and tried again on the WHOLE album with zero tags:
Where is gets confusing is when you have one track missing. Now the GUI is trying to tell you it will only write to some of the tracks.
This is why when you are trying to tag ONE track from the album the Picard GUI is trying to tell you about the ALBUM because you have the highlight on the ALBUM
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You pasted the last picture for me. In that image you are highlighting just the TRACK so Picard talks to you about just the one TRACK and the tags it finds.
Picard is trying to do so much in one small GUI it takes a bit of time to learn… but soon you’ll be flying with it. 
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thanks mate! already learned so much today!
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Always good to learn a new trick each day. There is help file for Picard if you click in the menus. And you can see plenty of people also on here to help as we all use it in different ways.
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Picard it is. And ExifTool for the obscure/unclear stuff. It dumps all and any tag it finds. Not convenient but as a last resort…
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@loungebob welcome to the OC date club!
You are not alone 
(Plugin api version 1 to version 2 differences or v1 docs)
In addition to Exiftool, Eye3d is a command line utility that will display all ID3 tags and let you remove or change them, including apparently Private frames.
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Better not find any ID3 tags in my FLACs! 
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Hmm. Maybe I should start a new thread for this but maybe this is quick and dirty.
I get all my old swing stuff from Deezer.
MB Picard identified and tagged all. However, in about 50% of the albums, Picard tagged some songs with a different album/year.
Is this MB database being not acurate or is this Deezer thinking they can get away with one master track being re-used for different albums/compilations?
MB data is not complete. Dates will come from the oldest release that version of the Recording appears on. Dates can be inaccurate for a number of reasons.
It may be that the recording is an edit of the original that appeared first on a Various Artists Compilation in the 1990s. There is no simple way to link these variations back to the original single or album if the length differences are large.
It may be that the original Single or Album is plain not in the database. A large core of data will be imported from CDs and it will rely on a fan of the music to have also added those original singles. And another bored fan to link the recordings. This can lead to missing original release dates for music like Swing that was mainly on vinyl.
As you can see, some artists are really well looked after. Whereas other artist can be a mess of chaotic data. How does data improve? MB gets us editors addicted and we start to fill in the gaps. That’s why my examples above are from Ian Dury.
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Just checking, are you making sure that Picard matches these recordings to the correct albums? Just to make sure, here are some basics that might not have come up:
Hitting the ‘scan’ button in Picard checks the audio fingerprint for the same audio file in the database, but it ignores any other tags, like the album tag. As popular recordings are reused across mountains of compilations (as you’ve suspected) it means you’re likely to have an album’s tracks matched to a whole mess of releases. Even though you’re only going for the original release date tag this might be causing your trouble.
I would always use ‘cluster’ and then ‘lookup’ (with the cluster selected), which looks for an entire album/compilation without splitting the tracks. If you can’t find the release then it would be awesome if you could just add the release 
It should only take a minute to add a release from Deezer using this tool: https://atisket.pulsewidth.org.uk/
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bloody brilliant! that works perfectly! thanks mate. should have read up on scan vs lookup. I guess since I almost always only have complete albums and for deezer and tidal lookup will be my choice anyway.
of course I’ll add anything not found. so far no “luck” though 
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oh. ah. cool tool! I read about it while snooping around but all was way over my head before I immersed into the all of it
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of course it’s properties. how did I miss that. my love for foobar knows no bounds!
thanks mate I’ll look into the plugins on the weekend!
learning waaaay too much about music processes here thanks very much, I suspected as much. and in the end it makes sense seeing as how complicated music licensing is, that matching and cataloging wouldnt be any easier.
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It is a nice side effect of MusicBrainz. There is so much detail available that you end up learning way more than you expected about your music when trying to work out which tracks you have. You thought you were coming here to simply add a few dates to your tags… instead you’re falling down a never ending rabbit hole of Musical Knowledge.
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That is exactly it! Silly me thinking 5mins and all is done. But I like it!
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