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by hashkb 3345 days ago
Finally a music tool with version control. I've been wishing for this to happen for so long!

The first big player (Ableton etc) to integrate versioning will have a huge advantage.

7 comments

Somewhat this. However, I am sometimes reminded by my more creative minded friends to abandon the rigid developer mentality of 'commit and keep everything ever; just in case' and instead follow a more creative focus on just making something. I have practically found that exploring too many ideas and branches ultimately delays the completion of any creative process ;)
What if the tool does the committing, and automatically does the commits as deltas? Something like the idea that the 'save' is fairly similar to the undo-redo data rather than some optimized object graph or optimized relational database representing one iteration.
Ardour has snapshots [1] which is a somewhat manual approach to this. I assume you can copy/paste parts of a session between snapshots as a "merge".

[1] http://manual.ardour.org/working-with-sessions/snapshots/

Hydrogen also has a "save version" action that does something similar.
I use Git on my Reaper projects all the time. But I've almost never gone back to an earlier version, and when I have I could've probably anticipated the branch point and just used "Save As". Nonetheless, it feels nice to have history "just in case".
Yes! With branches to try things out. It's hard to get the interface easy, even for text, but this would be great in principle.

Version control is the one of the most important ideas with the least uptake among regular people.

Splice is a user-friendly version control and backup system that supports Ableton, logic and FL Studio.

https://splice.com/

You can do this with Splice: https://splice.com/
If it does this for multiple authors, then it would be invaluable for cases where different composers are handling different aspects (such as if one composer is focusing on percussion and another is focusing on wind instruments, as is sometimes the case when composing music for marching groups).
Can't you just commit your ableton projects in git ?
Doing what you suggest would require closing and re-opening the project (which can take a while when working with GBs of samples).

Moving through the version tree could be as fast and efficient as undo/redo operations, which are usually instantaneous. In fact, DAWs already implement version control! It's just ridiculously limited, since all you can do is undo/redo. Depending on how they manage it internally, adding better version control features might not be that difficult. History and snapshots (a la Photoshop) would already be a vast improvement over what's generally available in DAWs.

Yes, but you won't get the intended output from a git diff or merge etc.
There's a LOT of binaries involved (in the sense of large .wav files at least), and I doubt the Live file format particularly lends itself to text-based version control
The Live file format is gzipped XML. It very much lends itself to text-based version control. (I've even played around with adding such as a third party.)
Whoa, cool! Good to know—thanks!
I do that all the time with my Renoise projects. Big files sometimes, so not perfectly efficient, but nonetheless it works great.
It would be difficult because every few minor revisions they update their DRM which forces you to resave the entire project to a new location.