the pains of file management

benniy's icon

dear folks,

i will never be able to wrap my mind around it:
how on earth is it possible to *reasonably* manage a M4L project / patcher with many non-embedded sub/bpatchers?

my observation:
1) i open a m4l device directly in max
2) i store this device as a new project
3) all sub- & bpatchers are placed in the project folder
4) strangely, about 4 main-patcher files are created, aswell.
(file.maxpat + file.amxd + file.maxpat.maxpat + file.amxd.amxd or something the like)
5) the sub- & bpatchers remain to be linked to their old source,
not as expected to the ones in the new project folder

is it *somehow* possible to open a m4l (or any) device that has it's subpatchers stored somewhere in the downs of my hard-drive and - so to speak - "collect all & save" to a new folder, updating dependencies etc?

thanks

Jeremy's icon

Hi, it sounds like you may have found a bug (or two). Please send your amxd and a comprehensive list of steps and/or a screen capture of what you did to reproduce this problem to support (at) cycling74 (dot) com to help us narrow it down.

Thanks, Jeremy

benniy's icon


as always, thanks jeremy!

Jeremy's icon

Following up, I got this info from support (thanks!) and had a look. You did find a nice bug (fixed for 7.0.2), but I think that what you're trying to do is not what you want to do.

An AMXD _is already a project_. All AMXDs contain a project as part of their data structure. If you look in the bottom toolbar of your AMXD patcher, you'll see the same project icon (it's a box connected to 3 other boxes -- not the most obvious, I admit) which you have when opening a patcher from a project.

So to manage the AMXD files, consolidate, etc., all you have to do is press that button to get the AMXD's project window.

Save as Project... is supposed to take a patcher and convert it into a project. When applied to an AMXD, it takes an existing AMXD project, converts it to a normal patcher and then converts that to a project. I don't know if that's useful, but maybe it is if you want to de-AMXD something for some reason. That's starting in 7.0.2. In earlier versions, it just makes a big mess. So thanks for pointing that out to us!

Jeremy