Merging takes

When a take has something worth keeping, merging brings its changes into another take. Merging is comping: you’re pulling together the best parts of different attempts into one version. Tabula merges everything that’s clear-cut automatically and only stops to ask when the same bar changed on both sides.

Which takes you can merge

Merging always runs between a take and the main take, in either direction:

• Comp a take into main — you’re on the main take, and you pull a side take’s changes in. This is the usual move: the main take collects the keepers.
• Pull main into a take — you’re on a side take, and you bring the main take’s latest up to date so your experiment isn’t working from an old copy.

You can’t merge two side takes directly into each other — route through the main take instead (comp one in, then pick it up from the other). This keeps a clear, single line of “what’s official”.

Running a merge

1. Switch to the take you want the changes to land in (the destination).
2. Open the take menu and choose ⇄ Merge from…. (Editors always see it; it’s greyed out, with a note, until the song has a second take.)
3. In the Merge a take dialog, pick the take to merge from. Tabula compares the two takes.
4. Review what it found, then apply.

If the two takes changed different things, there’s nothing to decide — you’ll see “No conflicts — (take)‘s changes merge cleanly”, and Merge brings them in.

Resolving conflicts

If the same bar was changed on both takes, Tabula can’t guess which one you want, so it asks. You’ll see “N bars changed on both takes. Choose which version to keep,” and for each one, the two versions side by side as notation:

• Keep (destination take) — the version that’s already in the take the changes are landing in.
• Keep (source take) — the version from the take you’re merging in.

Both buttons name the take, rather than saying “mine” and “theirs” — when you’re publishing a take to Main (below), the version that’s yours is the one being merged in, so a pronoun would point at the wrong side.

Pick a side for each conflicting bar — the notation preview shows exactly what each choice looks like, so you’re comparing the music, not guessing from bar numbers. Everything that didn’t conflict still merges automatically; a note tells you how many other changes (metadata or structure) came along for the ride. When you’re happy, choose Apply merge.

Conflicts are handled a whole bar at a time — you keep one side’s version of that bar or the other’s. Finer, note-by-note blending isn’t part of this step.

Bars you don’t touch stay on the destination’s version. That’s deliberate: the merge never changes a bar in the destination that you didn’t look at.

Publishing a take to Main

The steps above bring changes into the take you have open. To send a take’s work the other way — into Main, which is what the band plays from — use ⇅ Replace Main… in the take menu, or the Replace Main… button on the “Main has moved on” notice.

It opens the same comparison, with the sides swapped: Main is now the destination, and the take you’re in is the source. Everything else works the same way, with two differences:

• Conflicting bars you don’t decide about keep Main’s version, and the dialog tells you how many those are before you apply.
• If anybody changes Main while you’re deciding — one of the bars you were choosing between, or a bar you’d both quietly changed without it being a conflict yet — Tabula won’t publish. It re-checks Main at the moment you click, marks the bars that moved, and asks you to look again, so a merge can’t quietly undo a bandmate’s work. This happens even when there was nothing to decide. Edits to other bars don’t send you back — Tabula checks again and publishes — but if Main keeps changing through every check, it tells you Main is being edited right now and publishes nothing, so you can press Replace again in a moment.

Replace Main needs a live connection. Main is built from the server’s copy of this take, so if the connection drops, anything you typed since hasn’t reached it. Rather than publish less than you can see, Tabula withholds the action until you’re back — the take menu keeps the entry and says why, and the notice explains the missing button. Bring in changes… is unaffected.

Your take is left exactly as it was. It will usually still show the “Main has moved on” notice afterwards, because Main now contains work your take doesn’t — bring those changes in when you want them.

Comments come along

Merging carries the source take’s open comment threads into the destination, anchored to the same spot in the music — so the discussion follows the notes it’s about instead of being stranded on a take nobody’s looking at. Resolved threads stay behind on the take where they were settled.

After a merge

The merge is recorded in your band’s activity feed (“merged take X into Y”), and recent merges also appear in the take graph, with an arrow in the direction each one went. The take you merged from is left exactly as it was — merging copies changes across; it doesn’t consume or delete the source take.

If a merge is the end of a take’s life, the review step offers a checkbox: Delete “(take)” after merging. It’s off by default, because publishing to Main often isn’t the last thing you’ll do with a take, and it’s only offered when the take being merged in is a side take — Main is never on offer. Ticking it sends the take to the trash once the merge lands, where an admin can restore it for 7 days, the same as deleting it from the take menu.