I recently initiated a fairly large audio-only project and set things up along the lines I’ve used for video project with a non-free, “non-linear” editing tool. Specifically I’m capturing each segment (songs in this case) into a subfolder of a master project folder, which is locally on a RAID partition and mirrored to a cloud drive. In the past I’ve used google drive for this, this time it’s microsoft onedrive but they’re pretty equivalent for this purpose.
When I set up an edit I create the project in the same folder with the raw WAV files. Avoiding redundancy I tell it to read directly from the input. All is well until I get to another location and try to continue work on another synced machine. If the path to the synced folder doesn’t have the same prefix the alias construct in the project file is broken. This pops up a dialog that does not offer any viable fix, even though an automatic fix is easy if the .aup knows its own original path prefix and only slightly harder if it doesn’t.
There are several possible approaches to fixing this. One would be to alter the project serialization logic so that if the project file and an alias file share a prefix (or more restrictively, if the folder containing the project file is a prefix of the alias file path) then store it as a relative path. Two, ensure that the as-saved path of the project file is in the serialization (i haven’t checked yet) and if the input file isn’t found do some string prefix manipulation and see if it is found under the assumption that the entire project folder tree has been moved. Three, and this is a good fallback even if one of the others is implemented, add a “browse” button to allow the user to hook the program up with wherever the file is right now.
I don’t know if I’ll get around to it right away but this is all stuff I can do. Putting it out here in case it’s a really bad idea or somebody else wants to run with it.