> Yeah, DAWs are pretty close, but I was thinking of distribution itself. Basically a PDF, but for music. You don't necessarily need to ship all the original bi

> Yeah, DAWs are pretty close, but I was thinking of distribution itself. Basically a PDF, but for music. You don't necessarily need to ship all the original bits to generate the optimised postscript - just the postscript which will display the same thing everywhere. I think this could be done, probably easier than doing the same for video production. An audio signal is as simple as just a list of values... Basically, we would just have every "channel"/"track" from a digital audio workstation rendered into a file. For very similar tracks only the differences need to be stored. Then we would also need one "master" channel which stores mastering information. Now such a format would pose a couple of challenges. First of all, size. Lossless audio in flac takes quite a bit of space already, an entire album is usually around 100mb. This would use even more space. The next problem is that there would have to be a "standard" across digital audio workstations... how would tracks be classified? For example, the software Ableton Live allows one to group tracks and also group groups themselves. Effects can be added to groups but this people also use this feature just for organisational reasons. Other software might do this differently... Then the next thing which is probably the biggest challenge... the "player" would need to add the individual signals back together during playback and doing this in real time can cost performance. All in all, I have been dreaming for years about managing songs and audio projects with something like git. It would open up a whole new world for collaboration and I think theoretically it would be possible.