1
What is a good approach for version control of audio files?
I have a 20GB library of audio lectures to tune up and bring in to a state ready for releasing and sharing. It's important to keep the original files intact, as well as track certain milestones during editing (every single bit flip doesn't need noting).
While it would be super nice to a have a unified diff view like is possible with text, I know that is a pipe dream right now. What is important and perhaps feasible with today's software is to record the reason for the change and being able to fetch the file as it existed at that check-in.
The kinds of changes anticipated are:
- clipping dead air or irrelevant room noise from beginning and end of recordings
- selective volume levelling (e.g. speaker moved away from mic in minutes 12 to 18, or audience member asked question off-mic)
- applied filter to remove tape hiss/hum
- added or changed mp3 tag - such as artist name, recording date, ... (this is the one part that could be diffed perhaps?)
- etc.
I work primarily on Windows 7 but have linux machines too. My collaborators are mostly Windows and not technical. Tracking branching and merging (merging of branches, for the files it would be just straight overwriting) would be be great but not essential.
Storage should be of change deltas instead of dumb wholesale copies of each commit. We have more than adequate diskspace, but no one wants to copy 100s of gigs when only 20 are needed, and there's distinct possibility some collaboration will be over the internet
The project is for a very small non-profit organization. Tool purchase is not out of the question but would need to be inexpensive, though of course free and/or open source is much preferred.
While about audio the topic is applicable to most any binary format. The main reason for the audio tag is because of the MP3ID tag aspect is conceivably amenable to mainstream source code control tools, e.g. on commit run a script that extracts the tags and compares to previous states. – matt wilkie – 2016-06-12T00:18:11.317