Have you submitted the audio fingerprints after manually matching it? Scan does audio fingerprinting using AcoustId. If that does not give results AcoustId likely does not know about the song, and unless someone submits the fingerprints that won’t change.
As a general note for cases like yours and especially for compilations I’d recommend to use cluster + lookup over scan unless lookup does not give results.
You need to run “scan” or “generate acoustid fingerprints” on the file first. “generate acoustid fingerprint” only does the fingerprint calculation (which is enough for submission), while “scan” also does the online lookup stuff. But after both the fingerprint will be available.
For generate fingerprints either side is fine. “Scan” can only be done on the left (and has the side effect to also finding results if there are some).
Click Generate fingerprint in the left panel and submit it
Find the MBID of the album, move the file from the left panel to the right one, click Generate and submit it
What I mean is that if manual matching of a file to an album is required, the Generate function does not need to be available in the left Picard panel.
The generate fingerprint function is really just there to calculate the fingerprint without doing anything else. You can do it on the left panel before matching the files to tracks or afterwards (but you can only submit something once you have matched to a track). Some people also use it to store the fingerprint in the tracks (needs to be explicitly enabled in options) as they use it later with some other tool.
The fingerprint alone does not help you much, it only becomes useful once you can look it up on AcoustID to get the proper recording on MB. If AcoustID does not know about the audio yet you won’t be able to look something up. It is as if I play you some song you never heard before and then ask you about how it is called and on which album it appeared. You won’t be able to tell me
Except for manual matching the other automatic way is metadata lookup. Which in many cases would be preferred over acoustic fingerprinting as it often gives better results (e.g. select the proper release the recording appears on) if existing metadata is reasonable good.
Now I understand you keep removing all tags before doing scan. But we already told you you are making your life harder unnecessarily by doing so
If for that song there had been previously no associated AcoustId fingerprints others should get the result with “Scan” after your submission. They might or might not get the exact same result as you, based on existing metadata. A recording can be on multiple releases, and a fingerprint on AcoustId can be linked to multiple recordings, so Picard has to pick one (which it does by metadata comparison).
Submitting the fingerprint has no effect on the functionality of “Lookup”.
As long as you keep the standard settings Picard will write the recording and release MBID to the tags. If you load files into Picard which already have these MBID tags it will automatically load the matching releases on the right and attach the loaded files to it. That way updating the tags it is just a matter of dragging the files into Picard, maybe check what gets updated and saving again.
You removed all the information and the only info Picard was left with was a track number (8) and title (“Stray Cat Blues”), both of which Picard guessed from the filename, and the file’s duration (4:23). It found you a recording titled “Stray Cat Blues” with a duration of 4:23.
Really, let’s not repeat that discussion again and again. If you remove all the useful information Picard has to deal with what is left.