> I think popular software vendors should seriously reconsider their file formats in the 21st century, including graphical and audio ones.
Very true, but it's not just about vendors and formats. Making semantic changes a first-class, user-facing construct has profound implications for how you think about what you're modeling and what kinds of interactions (not to mention collaborations) are possible. Even Git is not "21st century" in that respect: textual diffs are not semantic.
For all of the things you can point fingers at Microsoft for doing wrong, opening up their second-generation document formats (docx, pptx, xlsx, etc) was a wonderful, positive move.
It's a shame that the music industry hasn't had a similar revelation. I'm tempted to be cynical and accuse them of fear and greed, but more likely "open data" just isn't something they think about.
I was under the impression their hand was forced. I vaguely recall various nation governments insisting on open standards or they would no longer use Office.
The OpenOffice formats were going through standardization and Microsoft quickly bought their way through the standards process (this part I remember). There was a lot of complaining of how they exploited the particular standards' body. They bought seats, that then sat vacant after they got their standard pushed through, and couldn't meet quorums on other standards being voted on.
There were also many complaints about the Microsoft standards themselves. Particularly, that you couldn't implement support for the documents based solely on their standard.
Yeah, pretty much everyone agreed that the ISO standard for docx was nearly impossible to completely implement for anyone outside of Microsoft and that it should have never been accepted as a standard.
Splice.com is this, and it's great, I use it with Ableton all the time. Versioning is easy, merging is impossible. But it's better than what I did before.
You'd miss out on all the goodies of version control like seeing what has changed. Ideally, version control for musicians would have the ability to show "change panning of guitar a to 0.3 and volume to 0.1" similarly to a code diff. Otherwise all you've got is just a bunch of backups, possibly with semi-informative commit messages if you really put a lot of effort into it.
I wish that there was a way of getting Logic X to output a list of changes you've made during a session. When I collaborate with my bandmate, I often struggle to describe all the changes I've made since he passed me the project. I'd also like to know the changes he's made.
My bandmate often works on our project while it's in a Dropbox folder, so I get a steady stream of notifications about impulse responses and undo files being changed; not very useful. I can tell when he's tracking because the new .aif files come over but that's about it.
I mean, Adobe Suite programs have a history feature where all your alterations to the image are listed chronologically. I don't know how that system works personally but it is a similar class of application & feature.
It would be possible if there was a change log constantly updated that was meta data to the stream. In other words, each time something is done on the audio/visual file, log what it was, and version control that.
I think popular software vendors should seriously reconsider their file formats in the 21st century, including graphical and audio ones.