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Comment by wavesounds | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone tried using Github to manage and share a Logic Pro project?

I work on music with someone 300 miles away and I'd love to have the power of git. Right now were both using different DAWs and export audio to dropbox. This release of Logic looks great and my partner is already using Logic so if I switch over and implemented git we could ideally be working off the same files all the time with version tracking, backups and branches.

I could see it potentially being very large though and merging audio files probably wouldn't be possible so maybe this is something that still needs to be built?

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I've actually been storing my Logic projects on GitHub for a while. It works pretty well for the most part, but I do run into some issues when dealing with the size of the files. Perhaps Logic X shrinks them down in size a bit in comparison to Logic 9, but I doubt it.

Here's the repo if you are interested: https://github.com/jpsullivan/LogicProjects

One day I'd really like to make an open source album that people could fork to remix entirely new sounds. It'd also be nice to get some people talking about best practices when mixing. Perhaps a Logic Bootstrap if you will.

I was also thinking about how cool open source albums would be! Your 'band' could now be 100 different people all spread out around the world. Then perhaps instead of an album being 'done' we'll just release v1.0.

And then if you had an idea on how to improve the music, it would just be a nice fork-edit-pull request away from improving the album. Truly collaborative music could be really cool.

> Truly collaborative music could be really cool.

Oh, the irony...

This is what my partner and I are trying to do with instajams.com. We've just soft launched and are in the process of getting feedback from some friends, but the jamming portion of it is rock solid.

>And then if you had an idea on how to improve the music, it would just be a nice fork-edit-pull request away from improving the album. Truly collaborative music could be really cool.

Only artists don't usually like it when somebody else "improves" their music -- that's a recipy for havoc. They have what is called a "vision" for their piece, so that any improvement would have to play within that vision.

Not to mention that what's an "improvement" to one, is an abomination for another.

I wonder if it would have the same issues as the "open source" collaborative cookie:

http://log.scifihifi.com/post/344372246/it-may-have-been-a-f...

>[Y]ou’ll probably recognize the "Dream Team" of expert bakers convened by Gundrum as his "open source" group falling into the same sorts of traps (a lack of coherent vision, a reluctance to discount any idea, an obsession with novel and exotic techniques, a mounting frustration as individual contributors struggle to be heard). In the end, they turn in a passable but uninspiring product, while the traditional R&D team wins the competition by acting on a bit of clever insight from its leader.

That's a really interesting point. IIRC in the Cathedral and The Bazaar[1] the author points out that a big part of the reason Linux was so successful is because Linus was such a master at running the project. Perhaps thats what these cookies were missing and perhaps an open source album would also need a 'Conductor' picking and choosing the best pull requests otherwise I could definitely see it resulting in lowest-common denominator blandness.

1. http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-baza...

I'm sure this has been done a number of times before, but this group is comprised of two people who have never met in person: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_for_Three!

Yeah The Postal Service are another famous example: "The band's name was chosen due to the way in which it produced its songs. Tamborello wrote and performed instrumental tracks and then sent the DATs to Gibbard, who edited the song as he saw fit (adding his vocals along the way) and sent them back to Tamborello through the United States Postal Service."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postal_Service

Git will always freak when you have large WAV files in there. Use git-media to offload that to an external file server: https://github.com/schacon/git-media

I've been toying with the idea of recording an open-source album, or at least recording the entire album the way I want and source-controlling it on Github at first. After the initial launch, I'd open-source it and start a whole remix side adventure with the album to see what happens. My only problem is lack of serious recording software, as all I have is a USB Blue Yeti mic and Garageband.

>It works pretty well for the most part, but I do run into some issues when dealing with the size of the files. Perhaps Logic X shrinks them down in size a bit in comparison to Logic 9, but I doubt it.

How would it "shrink" them? You record uncompressed audio in high resolution and bitrate. At the very best it could half them if it could use some loseless algorithm, but DAWs record and use AIFF and WAV.

There are more files in a logic project than just .wav files.

Sure, but the audio files are those that contribute most to the size.

The size of MIDI/automation files, for example, are insignificant.

As for samples, those are usually referenced from outside the project.

Yes. It works.

documentData is your project file. It includes the "code" needed to make your project go. This can be diffed, merged and branched with almost no effort. You will see the effects in Logic. You have to save & close Logic before doing the Git stuff, then reopen it to see your changes.

Everything else is pretty much binary WAV files. Logic is nice about creating new WAVs for every change you make, so while all the files do take up a bit of space it makes diffing a bit easier (manually, you can't `git diff` audio files).

BTW some friends and I are working on an service that does this, using Git and everything, and allowing you to use any DAW you wish: http://notepunch.com

blend.io is trying to do that.

You just have to make sure to include all your samples in your project, in ableton you do that with the "Collect and save all" option, Logic has one but I don't remember how it is called.

Do you happen to have an invite?

Use the invite code: EARLYACCESS to get into Blend.io.

Awesome! Thanks.

These guys do it.

https://www.gobbler.com/

I've been looking for something like that too, but the problem with this is the fact that everyone that wants to participate has to be on the same page and that includes third party plugins and instruments. Of course you can't assume that the guy you're working with has the same plugins. How could that be handled?

A bounced audio track won't allow a lot of deeper editing. Midi only doesn't tell the recipient anything about the instrument you used in your original version.

Of course I'm describing the issues from a perspective of someone who tends to rather work with synthesized material than recorded audio, which doesn't apply to every artist, yet it remains a very difficult problem, a dropbox folder or simple file exchange won't make it work in my opinion.

We currently work by mixing down everything and exporting the files to dropbox. And what you're describing is one of the main pain points I'd like to fix by using the same software and sharing the same project files.

Although idea of sharing music across the web sounds appealing in theory, as a musician, I personally wouldn't love the idea of working hard on something and 'web-collaborating' with a stranger and have them possibly add things to a song that I wouldn't like hearing in person.

On the other hand, the github idea is interesting. You "open-source" your music and allow others to fork it while still having some form of version control and rolling back if you don't like the changes or just want to revert to a different stage in the mix.

I don't know what genres you're into but web-collaboration between strangers is standard in electronic music. Even among the professionals.

It seems Apple could in part address this by including iCloud support in Logic.

I'm surprised this hasn't been addressed yet, given:

1) How many professionals use Logic 2) How common it is for said professionals to pass tracks back and forth over email, im, Dropbox and other filesharing services

Maybe advertising such as service gives artists an unwarranted assumption of privacy and security vs. using something like email where there is less expectation and more assumed risk.

Also surprised, perhaps they are issues with the content rights sharing audio/video on their servers? Thats the only thing I can think of. Getting into this market it would be a huge and important move for them to make.

Uploading/Downloading project files of a few GB, where a 300-400 MB can be added in just one additional session, doesn't work very well with iCloud and current BS connections.

So for a lot of people the experience would be subpar (with their 2-20MBps assymetric DSL etc). Not, Apple could only enabled for speedy connections (symmetric, fiber etc), but then tons of users would cry for being excluded.

That's not how Apple usually rolls.

I'd say than when the speeds are mature enough, in 4-5 years, there would be a version of Logic with iCloud support.

For now, they can leave it to third party providers, like Dropbox, so they get all the blame (and/or praise, for those that are content with that).

As far as I can tell iCloud still has no sharing feature. I was really bummed as I'd love to be able to use that instead of Dropbox for managing Pages documents (mostly book manuscripts), but it just doesn't seem to be there yet.

we are working on a new app to make it easy to do music together over the internet. working hard to release a beta soon, but here is some prototype/early alpha info/demo: http://getbandhub.com

would love to hear from people that are interested in this - you can reach out directly to me paosinaga@yahoo.com

Looks like a neat project but I would like something that uses Logic.

why? would love to understand. what type of music do you do?

It doesn't matter what kind of music he does if Logic is what he uses for arrangement and play.

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