"bundle" issue

[FL K]

Hi again,

Just wanted to seek clarification of how different "bundling" and the file searching allocation has become V4>V5 (obviously, "bundling" in V5 has moved to a concept called "save project and media to a new project folder, but use the shorter term for convenience still)

Back in the day, bundling moved everything into the video and audio subfolders, which I found rather neat; in V5, it seems that if the content already seemed to reside in a subfolder of the original show folder, it would retain this structure - not my preference, but I guess I could see an argument for that.

What I struggle with is this scenario:

- I "bundle" a workspace that fits the description to a new location to re-gather all media in one place

- the aforementioned extra subfolders are created (along with audio and video)

- I quit QLab

- for neatness, I try to move all the files to the sub-folders audio and video

- now, from my understanding, QLab should be able to find these, as (and this is where I'd love clarification), I understand that it first looks in the explicit file location, but then, if it cannot find it there, would look in the standard places (i.e. in the audio and video subfolder)... except it does not and reports the files as broken. Apart from manually going through file by file, what can be done to fix this situation?

Thanks for letting me know :).

Cheers,

Freddy

 

[FL K]

Hi lovely folks at F53,

Just following up on this - could you clarify expected QL5 behaviour when a file is not at the explicit path (does it still automatically look in different places such as the QLab folder and/or subfolders)?

Cheers,

Freddy

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Freddy,

We were at a company meetup last week, so I’m only getting back to check on Google Group questions now.

I was not able to reproduce your report.

For me, if I:

- Create a workspace that is saved in folder test/

- Use two audio files, one in test/audio/ and one in test/other/

- Save the workspace

- Quit QLab

- Move the file that was in test/other/ to test/audio/

- Re-launch QLab and re-open the workspace

It correctly finds the file in the new location inside test/audio/

-C

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[FL K]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for attempting to re-create... I have taken everything bar one file (one of the files that exhibited the issue) out of the following workspace, "bundled" it somewhere else, and the issue persists - just thought it might help you to re-create/check what the issue is.

At some stage in the process, probably when "bundling" V8 of my workspace to a hard drive for transfer to the show Mac), QLab must have decided for me that, rather than flatly dragging source files from an earlier version (V7) simply into audio and video, it would instead import the entire folder structure as subfolders (so the V7 show folder (with the audio and video sub-folders) copied as subfolder to the new V8 show folder - I definitely did not do this manually.

From then on, any attempt to move the files (including the small "Merril Notification" audio file) out of that V7 folder structure into say the V8 and beyond audio and video subfolders, resulted in a broken cue, where the missing path in yellow still pointed to the V7 subfolder structure.

Thanks for looking into this, maybe you have more luck :)! Since it was not "mission critical", but would be really good to be resolved for the future (so that "broken" workspaces can always be resolved by putting the files into standard subfolders of a workspace folder), it would be amazing if there was a fix, or at least an explanation/what-to-avoid-to-not-end-up-with-this-unfortunate-edge-case ;).

All the best,

Freddy

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Freddy,

Could you describe the issue in a series of short steps to reproduce it?  

-C

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qlab/400d5a0d-b038-415b-9a95-8ca370a6bf05n%40googlegroups.com.

[FL K]

Hi Chris,

My pleasure - as attached.

The only thing I did not notice straight away at the time - when exactly (and under what circumstances) the odd sub-folder structure was created, but while odd and unwanted, I guess that is still somewhat arbitrary -

More interesting/important is:

Why QLab does not find/go looking for the file in all of the workspace folder and its subfolder after it is missing (as that is at least what I understood QLab would be doing in case of a missing file).

Cheers,

Freddy

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Freddy,

Thanks for the video, that helped clarify things. 

I was able to recreate your result when working from an external drive — when working from the built-in drive those same steps worked for me.

My hypothesis (unconfirmed) is that the bookmarking mechanism is getting confused by the files being on the external drive. 

Finding and reconnecting files is a non-trivial problem that has many ways it can go wrong. We have some thoughts about reworking how QLab tracks files, but if we tackle them it would be in a major update and not during the v5 lifespan.

Best,

Chris

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qlab/5df68aa9-4180-4a74-82d7-d53471e3bd31n%40googlegroups.com.

[Rich Walsh]

Out of interest, does it make any difference if QLab is open at the time the files are moved?

Rich

[Chris Ashworth]

Thanks Rich for asking this question, as it has led me to update my previous answer:

In testing for your question, I found that QLab actually was also finding the files on the external drive after the move.

Whether QLab was running or not during the move did not affect it, but I believe in my first test I copied the files over to the new drive and then moved them around on the new drive before opening the workspace. 

The bookmarks saved in the document were for the old drive, and so the old bookmarks were not useful in finding the new file in the new location on the new drive.

When I opened the workspace and re-saved the document, it also updated the bookmarks for the new drive, such that after moving them around on the new drive QLab was able to find them again.

So I need to update my previous answer to say that the bookmarking mechanism does appear to be working as I was expecting, but of course QLab needs to be able to establish the bookmark of a file before it can use it, and it is possible to move files around in such a way (e.g. across drives) as to invalidate the old bookmarks.

There is room for a more comprehensive attempt to try even harder to find moved files, but at the moment I believe it is true that QLab will actually find your files if you move them, so long as they are moved within the same drive as they were last seen when the workspace was saved.

-C

[Rich Walsh]

This is what I thought: once the workspace knows the new UUID – which changes when copied to a new drive – QLab will always know where the file is. Until the workspace has been opened on the new drive, all it knows about is the file path – so maybe don’t change that before opening and saving in the new location.

This has been the doctrine for a long time, although I had trouble with it in 2022: https://groups.google.com/g/qlab/c/4PZHhO1x-0E/m/16DyLPOhBgAJ.

Rich

[Daniel Perelstein Jaquette]

Hello everybody!

For what it's worth—and recognizing that this may not be helpful—as a longtime user of QLab, and also somebody who has been teaching college students how to use QLab for over a decade now, I have observed that there seems to be increased confusion about how "bundling" works in QLab 5 compared to QLab 4. I haven't exactly figured out what the root of that confusion is, but I just know that on student's submissions, there are more files missing, and more often, than there used to be when it was just File / Bundle Workspace, zip your bundle and submit it.

One thing that I think might be useful to mention, if you are interested, Chris or others, is that REAPER handles this sort of thing really well. I just had an issue (which happens to me fairly frequently) where a student submitted one project with a bunch of missing files, but I had the relevant missing files on my computer from a former project they submitted. I had to retarget each and every file in the new project from the older folder of audio. The way REAPER would handle a comparable issue is that once you tell it where to look for one file, it automatically scans that same folder for all the other missing files. I thought a feature like that might be useful for QLab as well!

That said, you obviously have a million feature requests, so I'm not trying to put another request on your plate. Just if you are re-examining this behavior anyways, I thought it might be useful to have a suggestion of a model that could be helpful!

With gratitude for everything y'all do. QLab is amazing, and so are all of you!!

Best,

Dan Perelstein Jaquette

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[FL K]

Hi all,

Dan, I also know (and love) that same behaviour from After Effects - handy :)... but understand that it might take valuable resources from more pressing stuff, so... +1 on the issue tracker ;).

Chris, Rich - is it possible that this only works/applies to Apple formated drives? I often have the habit of formatting as ExFat as the "best of both worlds/lowest common denominator" - in case I need to exchange files with a PC person and/or need to access a backup from a PC... I just tried:

- Opened the workspace on that external (exFat) drive (no red Xes)

- added a memo cue (so there was a change)

- saved

- quit

- moved the file

- re-opened QLab, red X appeared.

So, for me, the issue persists... but, weird - after re-opening it on the external hard drive (after putting the file back, so no red Xs), I then proceeded to save the file with the "bundle" option to my system ssd, and during THAT move, it collated all files again in a single "audio" folder... so I am confused how QLab sometimes decide to preserve/create random subfolders under the show folder, that then sometimes persist through "bundling", but sometimes don't...

On the system ssd (apfs formatted), the moving of files within the show folder works indeed, so I wonder if truly there is a reliance on something in the way that apfs catalogues vs exFat. If I need to give up using it in order to get a more reliable QLab filing performance, let me know and I'll consider it :). I mean I know that exFat is not the most sophisticated of file systems compared to hfs, apfs, extfs and ntfs, but it is one of the rare things that seems pretty universally supported and still allows for large drives and large files.

Cheers,

Freddy

[Chris Ashworth]

On May 9, 2026 at 8:26:47 AM, FL K (busy...@gmail.com) wrote:

On the system ssd (apfs formatted), the moving of files within the show folder works indeed, so I wonder if truly there is a reliance on something in the way that apfs catalogues vs exFat. If I need to give up using it in order to get a more reliable QLab filing performance, let me know and I'll consider it :). 

Sounds like you have answered your own question ;)

-C