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SVN For Music Collaboration
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I'm just starting to teach myself version control with SVN for work and it dawned on me - does anyone use this for music? I'm not far into reading about its capability, but already as I read it seems way more powerful than I thought.
Using SVN to sync logic sessions for example that are stored on a remote server and synced locally seems like a pretty killer way to collaborate. I can imagine that merging data would get messy quick, right?
I know some of you probably use SVN or an alternative every day - is this a flawed idea, or could it potentially work? Would make long-distance collaboration so much easier! | |
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04/20/08
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Roshi
SVN with binary data can be pretty messy. At work, we try to avoid putting anything binary into SVN, mostly because of space limitations on our server (SVN is not smart enough to do diff with binary data). As long as you have room, it would be a nice way to do version control/collaboration.
There's also git, which I haven't used yet, which is a more distributed version.
04/20/08
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cbit
+1 fr what roshi said. With text files svn works pefectly, for merging, comparing revisions etc. For binary data you don't have those capabilities and can be more hassle than its worth. Also, storage demands would quickly rocket if you're saving all versioned audio.
I guess we need to wait a few more years before there's a practical versioning repository system we can use for audio projects.
04/20/08
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hecanjog
Dang, I had a feeling that may be the case, but hoped someone had gotten smart about it. Could work with the new max/msp file format though, so that's cool. But not for working on logic sessions with my band. 
04/20/08
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nagrom
We use SVN at the lab for Max patches / externals. It works well. I guess you could do the same thing with, say, Ableton project files as long as you agreed to a fixed sample base.
You might want to check out Git. It's got some serious advantages (not for binaries though as it keeps a local copy of the repository!)
04/20/08
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hecanjog
Cool - thanks Morgan, will do.
04/20/08
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em978
why not just use an ftp account??
It seems a little useless to use SVN becuase, the whole point of using SVN is to check your code against what is at the trunk. You really can't do that with binary files and you would just end up using like an ftp.
04/20/08
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hecanjog
we use ftp right now, but it means a 500 - 1500 megabyte download in most cases. once we all have the same files it's easier to swap only the files that have changed, but I thought it would be useful to automate that process.
04/20/08
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Roshi
You might want to look into some sort of auto-syncing service, such as sugarsync: link So you could share a filefolder across your computers
04/20/08
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hecanjog
that looks very cool, thanks roshi!
04/20/08
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crabster
rsync might do the job as well.
04/20/08
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daswesen
svn works nice, we shared ableton projects with it (with benedikt, for our dubstep stuff). It's cool also that ableton doesn't overwrite files, so you have no problems with wave files changing etc... The repository gets quite big though, maybe there is a better way to store the big ass wave files, cause once thy're in the repository, they'll stay there.
04/20/08
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deltasleep
I use SVN to keep a game I play up to date. It has a complex mod thats constantly changing and adding on new little scripts and bits of code, and SVN is perfect for the job.
04/20/08
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jogn
Yeah, once you check in your projects, the data is just going to stay there, plus no such thing as patching and resolving differences. You'd also have to manually download everyone elses branches to hear the difference and delete the trunk files to accomodate the new changes.
OTOH, a simple cronned perl script to convert the wav files to mp3 would ease the problem of reviewing the files, maybe a voting board for the changes for the writers, and then a replacement script to merge those changes, would ease things up a little.
04/21/08
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em978
hecanjog said: "we use ftp right now, but it means a 500 - 1500 megabyte download in most cases. once we all have the same files it's easier to swap only the files that have changed, but I thought it would be useful to automate that process."
I was thinking you were talking about using for something different then that.
my bad
04/21/08
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lgo
if there's a conflict, your binary file will be screwed, because svn notes differences in ascii right into the file. of course, it will be ok once the conflict is resolved. however, there are situations where a resolution can't happen which you'd normally just fix manually with a text editor.
it's fl studio-specific, but image-line's collab is killer for this.
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