Drag generated audio file to DAW

General JUCE discussion
1

Hi all,

We are working on an application (standalone + plugin) that generates an audio file to be dragged into a DAW.

Just before drag and drop, the audio file is generated and saved to Documents/[CompanyName]/[ProductName].
After saving, we call DragAndDropContainer::performExternalDragDropOfFiles to allow the user to drag it into a DAW

We set the canMoveFiles flag to true hoping that the DAW moves the audio file into a project folder (we tried setting it to false as well). Unfortunately, some DAW’s don’t respect this hint and they import the sample with a link to the original file. This means that if a user deletes the cache folder, the DAW project will contain a missing audio file.

Is there an obvious solution that I am missing? I’m curious to hear how other people solve this problem.

Jelle

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2

All you can tell your users is, “don’t do that”. Or at least if they want to do that they need to “consolidate” their projects first.

It’s an annoying “problem”, because you inevitably have the customers whose DAWs do import the files into their project complaining about the temporary files clogging up disk space for no reason.

3

Ran into the same problem. I have the plugin place a small RTF file inside the export folder:

Important:

Please note that your DAW projects might rely on the files stored in this folder. 

It's a good idea to collect these files into your DAW session before deleting any files in this cache. 

Otherwise, your DAW projects may be missing essential files.
4

Cubase gives you a message the first time you try to import audio asking you if you’d like the DAW to make a copy of everything from now on, which ofc should be answered with “yes” and “never ask again”, but Bitwig for example plays smartypants and just decides for you, that everything is just a reference. But there’s a trick: You can just overwrite CTRL+S from “save project” to “collect and save” so that the user can convert everything to copies everytime their muscle memory makes them save the project. We have to spread the message to the users that in some DAWs it is just their own responsibility to handle file lifetime

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