It depends a bit on the context, anyway objects you should look at are umenu folder filepath The latter allows you to temporarily add a path to the search paths.

awesome! I'll check out filepath that sounds like it might do the trick. I'm using umenu already....wait I'm remembering something...

if umenu outputs the .user/movies/pg...etc can't jit.qt.mov understand that? I tried to prepend read but it didn't work.

thanks for your help!

If you want to access anything outside of the search path, it's a good idea to use absolute paths.

And if there's a space in the path you need to use tosymbol and then prepend read.

thanks so much!!

one (id like to think last) question. If I have a patch and a sound file in the same directory, using sfplay~, I should just be able to enter the file name of the sound file, right? I have other patches, and have for all my uses of Max done this. Now it's not working. Why would that be?

New to Max5 and hoping it's a quirk or change

Yes that should work, but there can be some funny things going on if the file wasn't there yet when you opened the patch (this is the case with loading subpatches in bpatchers too).

Closing Max and then reopening the patch fixes this.