Toward better patch sustainability : techniques to ensure music software compatibility over time

No need to say here and now that making music using a computer program is a common practice. As common as making music with computers is the experience of not being able to re-play a piece after a certain amount of time — and even not a so big amount of time …

During this talk, I will try to give advices and recommandations for computer music programmers that want to make their patches a little bit more resistant to the passing of time, the successions of computer generations, software versions, and to programmed obsolescence. I will show some examples of preservation practices and prospective views on long term computer music preservation projects.