Have you ever published a track that you ended up loving but you've since tweaked the source song enough that you cannot recreate it? Do you have like a dozen saved copies of the same song with no clear indication of what you did for each version? Do you edit songs on multiple computers and get confused about which one has the current working version on it? Fear not, version control can help you.
I've been using a Git repository for my songs directory that lets me check in a saved copy of a .caustic file with a log message about what I did to that version. When I export a song, I usually make a numbered version of it and I can log that number in the log message for future reference. It's really nice when I look back at an old version and realize that somewhere along the line, I made a change that broke something. I put exclusions in place so the export subdirectory is ignored since I don't need to version the output files if I have the source material.
My technical question would be if there is an alternate (unassembled) way that a song can be saved so that individual changes can be more easily identified or is the .caustic file format all that's available? I'm still relatively new to Caustic and music making, but as a software engineer, I strongly prefer a change log and the ability to revert changes to a file.
As far as Git goes, you can create an account on https://github.com/ if you want to save it out on the internet or you can just keep local versions. Git can handle both cases pretty well. In my case, I push my changes to my own server repository that I can access from home or work (or the train). My songs directory is so much cleaner now than it used to be with only one instance of each song.
Hmmmmm.... Interesting approach. I often do "build saves" by adding characters to the end of my project name......
I started this method some years ago here:
http://www.singlecellsoftware.com/node/287
---this keeps it local..... and you can clean up older version builds as you don't need them anymore.
Your method seems to work well, as you can "cloud save" them, and pull out only what you need.
> My technical question would be if there is an alternate (unassembled) way that a song can be saved so that individual changes can be more easily identified or is the .caustic file format all that's available?
A .caustic file is a binary blob, the format is not public and Rej has said more than once he won't make it public due to keeping control of bugs and updates.
I have a new Android app being released that's called Caustic Guide that basically is a template maker and can save out all the pieces of a caustic file into smaller library files that can be loaded.
This is about the best you will get to aggregate caustic files for the future, unless Rej changes something.
Git is an interesting idea. I might give it a shot.
my_soundcloud
i'm stickin' with jason and mike's suggestion cause neither has been exposed thus far. @ javanaut what software engineering firm r u from?