Most producers just use SoundCloud for version control. You can export tracks directly from the DAW. Since it's cloud-hosted, it's easy to share with others and enable them to listen and drop feedback as comments within the track waveform.
kace91 · 3m ago
This is really a problem that should be solved by the daw itself.
AFAIK they all dump file management into the user, both for the “source” (projects) and the “binaries” (exported songs).
Ableton includes a feature for exporting self-contained projects so they don’t break if you load them in a different pc, which is the bare minimum, but other than that good luck.
Most of the problems engineers face are present in music production - collaboration, parallel work that may need to be merged, etc.
The subjective nature of music also makes it so that you’ll frequently want to try to develop the project some way and drop all changes if it doesn’t work, or that you’ll realise a change is problematic later (for example, something might sound well in headphones but horribly later in the car).
404oops · 18m ago
There should be a seperate VC for this, because using git for stuff like that is a bit wrong.
Also many DAWs export their project files as binaries (like Logic) so Git wouldn't like that much in terms of Diff and Compression
The main issue is also maintaining multiple folders. Git can do submodules, but that means creating new gits, publishing, making new submodules etc which is a waste of time that a normal person would rather spend making _v2s, even though they're cloggy and messy
sublinear · 10m ago
Are there any examples of music software that can be used professionally and isn't crippleware?
Specific to this "problem" with git, are there music project formats that aren't binary, or at least trivially and unambiguously machine translatable to/from plain text?
If the binary format is just TLVs why can't there be a plain text representation?
AFAIK they all dump file management into the user, both for the “source” (projects) and the “binaries” (exported songs).
Ableton includes a feature for exporting self-contained projects so they don’t break if you load them in a different pc, which is the bare minimum, but other than that good luck.
Most of the problems engineers face are present in music production - collaboration, parallel work that may need to be merged, etc.
The subjective nature of music also makes it so that you’ll frequently want to try to develop the project some way and drop all changes if it doesn’t work, or that you’ll realise a change is problematic later (for example, something might sound well in headphones but horribly later in the car).
Also many DAWs export their project files as binaries (like Logic) so Git wouldn't like that much in terms of Diff and Compression
The main issue is also maintaining multiple folders. Git can do submodules, but that means creating new gits, publishing, making new submodules etc which is a waste of time that a normal person would rather spend making _v2s, even though they're cloggy and messy
Specific to this "problem" with git, are there music project formats that aren't binary, or at least trivially and unambiguously machine translatable to/from plain text?
If the binary format is just TLVs why can't there be a plain text representation?