I’ve been using Splice to back up my Ableton projects for over 5 years with their unlimited free cloud storage, and it’s been a very reliable way to archive projects since it backs up all project dependencies. It’s also got its own version control and you can go back to older projects if needed.
This would be crucial for the longevity of VCV Rack in my opinion, as development continues older projects may break and we’d be able to see what version of VCV Rack and its associated third party modules are at and revert to that version. It would be sad to not be able to open projects in 5 years time, which actually is happening to my projects right now.
A question for the community and the devs, do you think this would be a possibility in the future as VCV Rack continues to grow? Maybe a partnership with Splice can come out of this. Maybe it’ll be a great way for VCV Rack to monetize as well since they have a “rent to own” plugin store. What do you guys think?
You’re talking about three completely orthogonal topics here: A server where you can upload your personal patches, patch backward compatibility, and the third-party service Splice.
For uploading personal patches to a hard drive in a data center, you can use Google Drive or Dropbox. They both support file versioning.
If you experience a breaking patch, post a bug report by following https://vcvrack.com/manual/Issues. All Rack patches made since Rack v1, and some made while Rack was in beta, will load in all future versions of Rack. If it does not, it is a bug you should report.
Splice is a retail store that sells and rents audio software licenses normally $100-400 with a ~50% commission.
Splice’s main service to vendors is marketing for those who do not have a marketing budget and marketing department, but since the VCV Library is a marketplace itself, we will increasingly develop the capability to do marketing ourselves, so Splice’s service would become decreasingly useful to us.
What I really appreciated about using Splice for backups when I was still using Ableton was that I could just hit command-s, and know that I’d get a new version each time, without having to worry about coming up with version names, deciding whether it was worth create a new version now, etc. Sounds minor when describing it, but for me it took a lot of unnecessary decision-making out of the process and really improved my workflow. Another nice thing was being able to easily add notes to a particular version. I’d love if this kind of integration with Splice came to VCV. I don’t know anything about how it works technically. I never used it much for collaboration, but it’s definitely nice for that - you can have a shared project that you both contribute versions, notes, etc to. Even if the integration didn’t keep track of what plugins were used in patches, or do anything other than just the backup / versioning / shared projects, I think it’d be really useful.
Oh, the other nice Splice feature is that you can upload an audio filed that’s associate with a version. And then there’s a player for those files on the web interface, and you can also download them. So if you output mixdowns with your versions (or the ones you care about), it becomes easy to listen back later and figure out which was which. I guess most of what I’m describing is probably achievable somehow with Dropbox, but Splice does have a nice interface for it that’s geared toward music making.