I haven't needed to boot into the audio config for a long time.

Do you mean you've been able to use the first config sufficiently for pro audio?

I think I'll try to get as much of the audio stuff out of the system config as possible.

I took that as meaning you wanted it in your user config, e.g., with home-manager, but it seems you need it to be mutable?

magnetophon: Noted. Thanks!

Now it would be awesome if I can get the entirety of my project in a nix-shell or something.

I’m also considering treating audio productions like programming projects, e.g., with a Nix flake specifying any hosts, plugins, etc. It would be interesting to solve music collaboration the Nix way.

I haven’t used this setup long enough to provide any numbers, but for example, if multiple collaborators are creating borg archives of the same project and many of the same files, borg's dedup should really shine. With git-annex alone, a git-annex cache might be helpful but wouldn’t provide any of the features you get w/borg for free. This is still an experiment, but the idea is to use borg to back up git-annex repos onto backup drives and keep git-annex working trees on workstations.

Another thing I should mention is that while I devised this w/music collaboration in mind, it’s implemented to be all-encompassing. (So in this case, borg will end up compressing and deduping a lot more than just audio.)