MusicManagementSoftware

Quora Answer : What would be the skills needed to build a source control system like Git but for music production?

Feb 11, 2020

The main difficulty of this isn't building something to track files. I'm sure any reasonably competent programmer with a reasonable knowledge of what git does could build a viable approximation of the basics.

The real issue is how to make diffs and patches in a whole bunch of very complicated, very badly documented, non standardized and proprietary binary file formats that are used in music production.

If you can't do that, then you'll have to store the whole binary asset every time the user make a small change to it.

And this will make your repository enormous. And if you're going to do that, you might as well just use git itself which handles binaries as black boxes.

I've looked into trying to work with FL Studio's flp files, and ImageLine themselves refuse to publish a spec or schema for them on the extraordinary grounds that "it's too difficult, the format keeps changing, and even we don't understand it"

Which is a bit of a WTF when you think about it.

But anyway, that's the real skill you need. To be able to forensically reverse engineer and find ways to meaningfully diff and patch and report diffs on many binary file formats.