Choose which albums to remove/merge when adding duplicates

[owetre18]

Note: I added this to the discussion board, and the main dev asked me to add it here, too. That's why you may be seeing it again.

When I import a “duplicate” album, sometimes I already have multiple versions of the album in the database. When I choose the “remove old” version, I’d like a way to pick which ones will be removed.

For example, I have both the original and extended (2cd) versions of Pablo Honey by Radiohead. Then I downloaded the original again, but in FLAC instead of MP3. I wanted to remove the old MP3 version of the original release and replace it with the new FLAC version, but NOT remove the MP3 extended version. Currently, it’s all or none.

How could this feature be implemented properly and in a user-friendly way?

Well, I’m not sure about the coding part of this. However, I think that when showing the duplicates available, they should be numbered (and also have their unique ID shown, but that’s another request). The prompt should say something like “Skip New, Keep both, keep Some, Remove old, Merge all”. When you select “keep Some” or S, it should ask “what numbers?” Then you provide (in one command) what numbers to keep. So if I want to keep 1, 3, and 14, I input “1 3 14”.

[sampsyo]

As I mentioned in a comment:
https://discourse.beets.io/t/feature-request-improve-importing-duplicate-releases/295/4?u=adrian

A slight generalization of this might also make sense, where a single "Select" option lets you group/skip any subset of the albums.