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It kinda works... it essentially modifies the paths of each artifact using the ../path/to/file convention. What that means is the new "artifact directory" is a kind of half breed where only new artifacts are written to it while others remain in the project's root. Of course, I understand the "do no harm" approach that was taken. I could argue if we're changing the location to store artifacts, we should move them in order to reflect the actual change. Then, I'd immediately have another argument with myself. This would go on and on...

Anyway, back to it...

So changing the project's properties to use the ./directory convention does qualify as a solve for the project being handled in a "relative" fashion but it's still too dirty for my taste. Qtractor would be nicer to work with if the location of the artifact directory was treated in a relative fashion the first time a project is setup. It gets tricky because we're actually doing this in 2 separate phases; first, we're specifying the location to persist artifacts after we use Clip/New. The wizard thing has always been clunky to deal with because there's this weird auto-create-directory kung-fu happening... it's just weird and not intuitive at all. Then, phase 2 comes when we're done fleshing out our original ideas and we go to save the actual session.

I kinda think the whole bootstrap sequence is due for an overhaul. For the sake of scribbling, I've always thought it should operate along the lines of:

1. Start Qtractor
2. File/New
3. Qtractor prompts for 2 things: Name of project and a location on disk to persist it. There should be no automatic correlation between those 2 things as it's perfectly acceptable to store project Foo in /path/to/projects/bar. Of course, the actual project in that case would be saved as /path/to/projects/bar/Foo.qtr

The only automatic thing happening following the prompting for those 2 tidbits of info would be the creation of /path/to/projects/bar/session where all artifacts (.mid, etc) would be persisted. That session directory would then be referenced accordingly (if even needed?) in the .qtr file.

That's kinda a big lift though and I'm not even suggesting I've given this more than a few minutes of thought. All I'm really pointing out though is I'd really like to see Qtractor do 2 things:

1. Keep the artifacts separated from the actual project file itself.
2. The project references its dependencies (artifacts) using a relative approach from the get-go (as opposed to the current absolute method).