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Comment by eriknstr | Hacker News Reader

I think the name "GitHub Audio" is confusing and probably a trademark violation. When I read "GitHub Audio", I figured it was a new service by GitHub for musicians to version control their music.

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> When I read "GitHub Audio", I figured it was a new service by GitHub for musicians to version control their music.

Same here, I was ready to let my mind explode with the implementation details.

Yea I will admit, when I saw the title, I thought Github was getting into the SoundCloud space, except where people could upload music source or midi files and it would render/play them. :)

Exactly what I thought as well. We're not all crazy to think that'd be a good idea, right?

Isn't that sort of the idea of splice.com? (And if it isn't, it is still a great idea!)

And just how it would change everything! Maybe it's because I'm really new to production and don't have a workflow down, but I find that music creation would be significantly more productive with version control.

> I figured it was a new service by GitHub for musicians to version control their music

This is why I feel the new TLD's are entirely a racket.

ICANN builds a system which is favorable to squatters - and when all the "good" domains are taken for com/net, they start to release new TLD's (instead of clawing back unused squatted domains) which corporations and celebrities must rush out to purchase or risk someone else using their brand name.

There's the infamous story of Taylor Swift having to purchase her name on the .xxx, .adult, and .porn TLDs[1]

And now presumably GitHub will feel compelled to purchase GitHub.academy, GitHub.technology, GitHub.build, GitHub.buzz, GitHub.careers, GitHub.codes, and many many more!

So now ICANN can kick back and enjoy all those extra fees, and Registrars can kick back and enjoy all their new registrations... meanwhile squatters buy up a bunch of new domain names on the new TLDs, putting everyone right back where we were before the new TLDs were released.

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/03/23/taylor-swift-adult-domains/

That would be very very cool, but good luck with trying to version .logicx or .cpr

I think popular software vendors should seriously reconsider their file formats in the 21st century, including graphical and audio ones.

> I think popular software vendors should seriously reconsider their file formats in the 21st century, including graphical and audio ones.

Very true, but it's not just about vendors and formats. Making semantic changes a first-class, user-facing construct has profound implications for how you think about what you're modeling and what kinds of interactions (not to mention collaborations) are possible. Even Git is not "21st century" in that respect: textual diffs are not semantic.

For all of the things you can point fingers at Microsoft for doing wrong, opening up their second-generation document formats (docx, pptx, xlsx, etc) was a wonderful, positive move.

It's a shame that the music industry hasn't had a similar revelation. I'm tempted to be cynical and accuse them of fear and greed, but more likely "open data" just isn't something they think about.

I was under the impression their hand was forced. I vaguely recall various nation governments insisting on open standards or they would no longer use Office.

The OpenOffice formats were going through standardization and Microsoft quickly bought their way through the standards process (this part I remember). There was a lot of complaining of how they exploited the particular standards' body. They bought seats, that then sat vacant after they got their standard pushed through, and couldn't meet quorums on other standards being voted on.

There were also many complaints about the Microsoft standards themselves. Particularly, that you couldn't implement support for the documents based solely on their standard.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah, pretty much everyone agreed that the ISO standard for docx was nearly impossible to completely implement for anyone outside of Microsoft and that it should have never been accepted as a standard.

Really, I thought that docx abused it's specification using very rough edges to make it difficult for opensource applications to implement.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-micr...

The major obstacle isn't so much the file formats as just the raw file size.

Recording 16 tracks at 96/24 is 4.6MB/sec.

A typical 3 minute pop song is almost 1GB.

If you're keeping multiple takes that will obviously balloon tremendously.

Splice.com is this, and it's great, I use it with Ableton all the time. Versioning is easy, merging is impossible. But it's better than what I did before.

Why wouldn't it be possible to version control in the same way we version control other random files? Just treat it as a stream of arbitrary data.

You'd miss out on all the goodies of version control like seeing what has changed. Ideally, version control for musicians would have the ability to show "change panning of guitar a to 0.3 and volume to 0.1" similarly to a code diff. Otherwise all you've got is just a bunch of backups, possibly with semi-informative commit messages if you really put a lot of effort into it.

I wish that there was a way of getting Logic X to output a list of changes you've made during a session. When I collaborate with my bandmate, I often struggle to describe all the changes I've made since he passed me the project. I'd also like to know the changes he's made.

My bandmate often works on our project while it's in a Dropbox folder, so I get a steady stream of notifications about impulse responses and undo files being changed; not very useful. I can tell when he's tracking because the new .aif files come over but that's about it.

I mean, Adobe Suite programs have a history feature where all your alterations to the image are listed chronologically. I don't know how that system works personally but it is a similar class of application & feature.

It would be possible if there was a change log constantly updated that was meta data to the stream. In other words, each time something is done on the audio/visual file, log what it was, and version control that.

This is essentially what non-destructive edits are in the photo-editing realm

ES/CQRS for audio editing.

Yes, but more tantalizing would be some kind of wavelet-based semantic versioning. This might allow merging.

I'm not sure about GitHub but Google insist you use naming like "X for Google Chrome" where the Google product name is in smaller letters when it's part of a logo to avoid brand confusion.

Would a non-profit thing like this violate the trademark? This is just like publishing an interactive graph on Github usage.

Possibly. I found this doing a quick search. I don't know how credible a source it is, but it sounds reasonable. (Better, more reliable sources would be interesting to see).

"Non-commercial use cannot be prevented, except if that use harms the distinctiveness of the trademark."[1]

There may well be an argument that the confusion about who's behind this and that it actually deals with the company holding the trademark, I would think GitHub has a case. I'm not sure it would be worth pursuing, unless not doing so threatens the enforce-ability of trademark.

[1]http://www.iusmentis.com/trademarks/crashcourse/rights/

Why would it matter if they were non-profit? Any brand confusion has the potential to harm the original brand.

You generally have to be involved in trade to be in violation of a trademark.

> You generally have to be involved in trade to be in violation of a trademark.

What's the rational behind that though? If you had a charity, a free web game, a free book etc. concerning something people find offensive with the name "Super Mario" in it, many people would be legitimately confused if Nintendo was behind it which could cause harm.

The naming and URL would probably fall under "nominative fair use", which allows you to use another entity's mark in order to referred to that entity, As long as you are not suggesting that you are sponsored or affiliated with that entity.

The other issue might be one of "initial interest confusion", which is exactly what happened with some people here: they clicked because they thought it was something other than what it was. Apparently that is actionable but inconsistently so, and the doctrine is controversial.

Source: my dad is an IP lawyer and I asked him about it.

I think there might be different considerations involved if Github actually wanted to use the "github.audio" domain name.

If you're looking for music version control, check out Splice.

Me too - I was so excited at first..

My thoughts too. A collaborative SoundCloud? A Git repo for music sheets?

Funny, I thought it might be a normalizing set of audio interfaces to make web audio easier to use... A bit more than their fetch shim.

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