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Comment by roblh | Hacker News Reader

DAW version control is one of my dreams. If I could have a really tight git equivalent for reaper projects, it’d be so cool. Plugins are, as usual, the biggest barrier there. Doesn’t seem like there will ever be a good way to deal with different people having completely different plugin collections. Unless someone makes “Netflix but for plugins” or something.

The other thing I saw the other day that I thought was cool was a reverb plugin that uses your GPU. Seems like the next step for modeling could easily be in that direction. Especially since the bar there is low, pretty much just the positively ancient UAD hardware acceleration cards, although UAD themselves seem to be going the opposite way and pushing native stuff now.

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Splice actually started out with version control for collabs - it was called Splice Studio and was killed off recently. Don’t think it ever found PMF (doesn’t mean there won’t be a product for this eventually) - https://cdm.link/2021/04/splice-studio-is-free-backup-versio...

Turns out their pivot to being Netflix for samples/plugins is more in demand :)

Yeah +1 on version control being a dream. If real, functional version control for any DAW in the manner it sounds like you have in mind exists I will start making music with DAWs again!

Sounds like you're talking about both version control and project portability, which are different concerns. But with respect to version control, many systems like Cubase use XML project files. As long as you don't physically delete any audio from your disk, basic version control on your machine using git should be possible.

It’s true that you can dump a project into a git repo, but the real problem is diffing. It would be pretty miserable trying to reconcile any significant changes or conflicts. What I think would be cool is a tool for auditioning and merging specific changes that’s backed by git somehow. I’m not really sure what it would look like though.

In the mid-late 2000's, Ardour (and a couple of other DAWs) had support for branching undo/redo histories.

We (Ardour) abandoned it, because the universal experience of non-programmers was that they had no idea how to even begin to use this sort of feature. The majority of DAW users don't come ready to deal with the complexities of a branching workflow, or even a desire to learn it.

There is at least one band out of Madison, WI that uses/used git with Ardour during the height of the pandemic to facilitate remote collaboration on new pieces. They gave a talk (and played) at the Ubuntu Summit in Prague last year.

There are plenty of apps like Figma and Google Docs that have a kind collaboration and version control that non-programmers are able to understand.

I was specifically referring to branching workflows, not version control in general.

That’s wild, super cool that you guys were trying to make that work so long ago. I can see how people unfamiliar with that way of thinking would be completely lost. Especially in the context of a daw which is basically a wall of buttons and switches.

As a very entrenched Reaper user, I haven’t tried Ardour, but I’m glad it exists and continues to exist. Thank you for your work :)

I'm right there with you. I once tried managing ableton projects via git. Was a dream from a simplicity standpoint but was not effective in the long run. I don't remember why it didn't end up working well but I abandoned it shortly after trying it the first time. Something like this in modern DAWs would be incredible.

if files are getting managed by blobs, git doesn't really scale well with that since it stores diffs.

`bup` notionally does this a lot better, or git-lfs.

https://github.com/bup/bup

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bup/bup/main/DESIGN

https://git-lfs.com/

git really needs textual representation for any kind of meaningful commit, and binaries totally break that.

> git doesn't really scale well with that since it stores diffs.

This is precisely what git does NOT do.

Re: point 1, I feel you! Any chance you have checked out Splice or other rent-to-own plugin providers? It's not quite Netflixy, but less steep compared to upfront VST purchases.

[0]: https://splice.com/plugins/rent-to-own

FLStudio lets you save a new incremental version with CTRL+N, I use that as a sort of version control so I can roll back to an older version of an ideas if needed. Doesn't provide any equivalent of merging with head or branching or anything but it gets the job done for my needs.

In the open source world, a DAW could really just include everything. You'd still need plugins occasionally, but I don't see why there couldn't be a curated collection that covers all the basics.

For a lot of NN-based analog modeling you don’t even need the GPU. I trained a model on the API 550A EQ and SIMD is fast enough for real-time inference.

What would a DAW-diff look (sound?!) like though... Though surely any sort of XML (or JSON etc.) based format would be fine for using along with git etc.

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