Anyone here using versioning control with DAW projects ?

[tylenol]

I used to have all my audio projects in a big git repository with a bunch of other stuff. However, I concluded in the long run that this was a good idea in principle but just big mistake in practice. I never used or needed the versioning information (and most of the files were binary and so probably wouldn't have really had robust versioning information anyways). I don't exactly see how you can really use most of the version control features without some kind of daw interface to version control anyways (e.g. how would you resolve a merge conflict?? You wouldn't, you'd just choose one), which I don't see anyone except maybe ohm force providing in a real way. Finally, the git blob took up a huge chunk of extra space, which over 5 years of doing this really added up. For mainly binary data this at least doubles the disk space you use (or more, depending on how much you change), and this is a problem for sample-heavy projects, projects with a lot of frozen tracks, and projects in the late stages where there may be both frozen/rendered tracks and many high quality renders.

It was an extra mistake to mix this in with other stuff in a heterogeneous repo with other projects (mostly writing and some programming), so really don't do this part. (This mistake probably comes from my having learned version control in the CVS days.) This extra space is multiplied on a bunch of computers, and whenever I committed any work on my audio computer it added a huge time multiplier every time I wanted to push something else, that I'd inevitably forget about, and be trying to push so I could go to my office or whatever and have to wait 15 minutes for the upload. I've since removed all my audio projects from that repository, and I won't be putting them in their own version control any time soon. I probably need to figure out how to rebase them out of the repository or whatever.

I concluded that what I really want is good backup support, a workflow where I could unroll any changes without too much effort and keep track of what I'd done (which it turns out I'd already pretty much had), some way of dealing with stale plugins that won't load 5 years later, and maybe some way to sync across devices; version control just doesn't provide any of these in a compelling way for audio projects right now. I can imagine many people also would want collaboration features but as someone who does use git for collaboration on code and writing, this would be _terrible_ for audio projects right now. I haven't really put in place a full replacement because I've been on a bit of an electronic music hiatus, but for me in 2015 it would be crashplan + paid dropbox (which I have anyways) + good notes + separate backups of pre-mixdown versions (and so on) with frozen audio.

[heybuddy]

I just started using https://splice.com/ for versioning (and sharing) projects. It's pretty sweet and free!

I've also started keeping some synth patches on github, which is pretty fun. It's nice to be able to work on a sound and then go back and checkout a revision from partway through the process, especially when the process gets messed up!

[DJ Warmonger]

In reality I never need to have more than 2 versions of a track. Us ethe second one only for experiments that would be hard to revert. If they work, I simpy continue to work with the project, if they don't, I revert to previous copy quickly.
Version control is probably useful only for large projects with numerous contributors and complex structure with mutual dependencies, but that's not the case for music.