[SOLVED] dynamically loading an encapsulated file into an external, in a M4L frozen device

Hi there,

I’ve been banging my head against this problem for a while now, so I thought maybe someone would have some insight here.

First, a description of the problem’s context:
I am working on the development of a Max4Live device, for which I have developed a dedicated external (using min).
This external uses a dynamic library (namely, PyTorch), and requires that a file (the .pt model) be loaded at runtime.

So far, for development and testing, I have been solving this by placing this .pt file in a folder next to where the .amxd sits, and using the latter’s path (from [thispatcher]) to locate my .pt file. This worked well. So far.

The constraint is that I now need to distribute this M4L device, which implies having just one .amxd file, and no environing folders. I also need users to be able to "collect and save" their Live sets without everything getting broken.

So far, I have tried 2 different strategies, but none of them showed up successful:

1) Placing the .pt file in the .mxo, and calling it with a relative path (via https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.jit.load.html). The problem seems to be that when a relative path is called, it seems to be relative to the executable (i.e. Max itself ? And what when running within Live ?), and not to the external itself. Hence my question: Is there a way to get the path to the external’s executable (or to the .mxo) ? I have seen this has been discussed before in the forum, but I couldn’t find an actionable answer (or at least one I could act upon).

2) Including my .pt file in the .amxd’s project and consolidating it. However, when doing so, I don’t know how to retrieve the file’s path after freezing the device. I have tried using [absolutepath] with the file’s name and passing the resulting path to my external (and forward to `torch.jit.load()`). But as soon as the device is frozen, [absolutepath] only returns (notfound) as a result). Hence, my alternative question: Is there a way to get the path to an arbitrary file in a frozen device’s project file structure ?

I would be so grateful is anyone has any hint to help me moving forward this, because I’m feeling a little stuck right now (and unfortunately, for a while).

Thanks in advance,

Pia