are there newer thoughts about versioning musescore documents?

• Dec 30, 2022 - 17:58

my search leads me to
Version Scores with Git | MuseScore
https://musescore.org/en/node/22655

which is very thorough and along the lines of what I was thinking of, but it's about 9 years old, so I wonder if folks have had other thoughts or come up with other approaches in the meantime.


Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Thanks, though. (I wondered, in particular, whether others had perceived a similar need and this had evolved into a feature request somewhere -- presumably I would have found a link.)

The post resonated with me, because I'm also a programmer (who now happens to dabble in score writing and editing.) Similar phenomena turn up, presumably, wherever documents of any kind get worked on. I tend to think it's generally too hard a problem to solve well inside a document-processing application and that it's therefore more pragmatic to take the approach seismicmike described in https://musescore.org/en/node/22655.

(Incidentally, even where developers have made valiant efforts at version control and comparison, e.g. in M$ Word, I would argue most of us would be better off migrating, e.g., to AsciiDoc+Git or saving their word docs in a lossless ascii format (assuming one can be found and agreed upon) and versioning these with git or a comparably performant and standard system.)

(Also incidentally, I, like many others, have struggled at times with git, particularly under Windows. I would still ultimately defend and favor it.)

I use manual (Save-As) versioning with values < 1.0.0 being work-in-progress and >= 1.0.0 being finished scores. To keep things simple I remove the version number from a copy of the latest version before uploading to musescore.com.

Current example:

versions.png

As you can see, I have deleted some of the earliest versions of this score since I will never go back that far.

In reply to by yonah_ag

Thanks! I can very much relate to your approach and have tended to take similar steps at times. I think this would generally be unwieldy for me, though: I would need to keep a folder for each document instead of a file (or sometimes a file, sometimes a folder) and fear it would add to clutter instead of helping me better organize it.

I'd also prefer, I think, just to live with all the past versions (if they don't take up too much space) even if I rarely look at many of them.

That said, your approach would have some obvious advantages. To compare two versions I would probably just open both of them in separate windows and compare visually. (I fear it would be challenging to display visually what changed between versions of a score: things can change in too many dimensions, as it were: instrumentation, length/sequence/structure, key, time, ..., in addition to smaller details within voices.)

I wouldn't yet expect to do much comparison between versions; rather, I would tend just to save snapshots along the way, e.g.: my first draft; feedback from others; revision after feedback; later reworking for adding new instruments, key-change, or other reasons.

In reply to by timbeechanson

I generally only revert if I've put something in and then didn't like it. Detailed comparisons are easier by saving 2 mscz scores to mscx format first and then opening in any decent text/html editor.

I really just use versions as snapshots on each date that I work on the score and as protection against score corruption, since a number of users over the years have reported scores becoming completely blank, apparently at random.

All my versioning takes place in an Archive folder, (with year subfolders), and only the latest released version makes it into my Live scores folder. Otherwise, as you say, there is too much clutter.

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