These functions search MusicBrainz for the earliest release date of a track. These are convenience functions as they call an action to do the work:
Actions>Earliest Recording Date from MusicBrainz>Using Title and Artist
calls action: Earliest Recording Date from
Actions>Earliest Recording Date from MusicBrainz>Using Title
calls action: Earliest Recording Date from MusicBrainz-Title
The actions are automatically imported if they cannot be located. The imported actions contain a single MusicBrainz Earliest Recording statement which provides the configuration for the desired functionality.
When the action is first imported you should view it in the Action Manager looking at the single contained MusicBrainz Earliest Recording statement to ensure that it is configured how you wish.
Warning: the generated version of the action has Accumulate all possible matches enabled. For some tracks this can take a very long time. See the help for the MusicBrainz Earliest Recording statement for more information.
The main window status bar displays the progress. When a track is being processed the total number of pages to be fetched is displayed. Each fetched page can describe 100 recordings. These pages are fetched at a rate of one/second. If you decide you do not want to wait for a particular track, select File>Cancel or the toolbar Cancel button. The typical cancel process is intercepted and a panel is displayed. If you select Skip, no further pages will be fetched for the current track. If you select Continue, the panel will be dismissed and fetching will proceed. If you select Cancel, the entire process will be cancelled. You can optionally check the Disable accumulate all possible matches option. If you do so all subsequent tracks will only fetch a single page. Note that in this case Continue and Skip are effectively the same.