Git for Music – Using Version Control for Music Production (2023)

Summary

last updated on 6 Apr 2024 Being both a musician and a software engineer, I always felt that these two areas are almost completely separated. My developer skill-set seemed to have little to no use for my work as a musician. Which is a pity considering how cool it would be if there was some kind of a sinergy across these two sides of my life. Recently, though, I have found a useful possibility to utilize something I previously used solely for my development work, namely, git, the version control tool, for my music production. Okay, and now let’s get to the point and… meet Git for music production Did you notice yourself creating a dozen of versions of your project? Are the names like this familiar to you? my-cool-song-new-vocals-brighter-mix-4.rpp Did you ever feel frustrated about unmanageability of all this and how sloppy you project directory ends up looking? This version nightmare problem for software people has a solid and well-recognized solution: version control systems. Such as “git”, which is not only the most widely used one in the industry, but also completely free, open source and cross platform (that is working flawlessly on Win/Mac/Linux). For music production, I use Reaper, and instead of creating dozens of copies of my project file (my-cool-song.rpp), such as my-cool-song-new-vocals-brighter-mix-4.rpp, I simply initialize a git repository in the project folder and put the file under version control. This git repository will be the “home” for managing the version of our music project. By the way, a good supplementary for this reading could be this video of me going through an example. If you are not fan of watching videos, feel free to read on. VIDEO My git-based music production workflow Although, when wearing a developer hat, I am normally in linux, for the music production stuff, due to the better availability of plugins and such, Windows is a better option. For Windows, you can install git-bash, and have all the git functionality at your fingertips...