If you’ve worked at all with patching your own creations for music, visuals, and control, this has probably happened to you: you’ve made some change, and forgot what you did. You think of something you did some time ago – and forget what it was. Or you want to be able to easily collaborate with other people, and that means a lot of files flying around and no idea which file has which change. All of these problems are familiar to programmers. The solution: a technique called version control. Sounds fancy, but it’s really accessible to anyone, not just advanced programmers. And once you try it, you’ll never go back.

Git is a popular version control system that’s all the rage these days – aided by the star power of Linus Torvalds, its creator (who uses it for Linux kernels, not Max patches, sadly). Mormo aka Tomasz comes to the rescue of patchers with a complete guide to applying Git to patch management. Now, I’m a big fan of Subversion (”svn”) myself — but even then, you can follow the basic guidelines here and get something going.

Aside from the technical details of how this works, Tomasz gets into some of the deeper issues of what this is really about: sharing, collaboration, and openness.

Basement Hum: Version Control and Max/Msp. Part 1: Delegate Versioning to Git
Basement Hum: Version Control and Max/Msp. Part 2: Fragmentation vs Collaboration

Before you get scared away, just trust me on this: if you make patches, even simple ones, if you have zero programming experiment, you’re going to wind up loving version control. Naturally, this kind of version control could eventually be applied to musical materials and not just code and patches – and that’s when things get really interesting.