alt Hacker NewsThis 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).
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Ardour projects are self-contained by default, and can be moved between different systems and different operating systems.
The problem comes mostly from two angles:
1) DAWs which allow you to use external audio/MIDI files and do not place referenceable copies of them inside the session/project folder itself.
2) Plugins that are available on the original system but are not available for whatever reason on the new system.
In my experience, #2 is a vastly bigger issue than #1.
At least the Reaper has a quite readable "rpp" XML project file. So this probably works nicely. Other that that, versioning DAW projects is a pure hell. It would require to version control all samples, plugins, configurations, etc. I don't really see an easy way to do it.