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>>having the option to not doing that would bring a lot of trouble, like files vanishing without warning or control, specially after you try to save and replace an existing jack-session file set.

But this is exactly what I'm trying to avoid! I just lost half a day's recording due to this "feature".

I often have a number of sub-projects within a composition. With the current setup, this means completely different archives for each sub project. This means I have to update every instance of a qtz archive with the new one - if I remember to do it. And then there's still the original project that has been created lying around on disk. This can eventually consume gigabytes of data for a project that perhaps only really requires 200-400mb.

Sometimes I want to quickly open a qtractor session and tweak something. Can't do it. Have to open up a complete project along with perhaps too many plugins and synthesisers to effectively work. Also those precious moments of inspiration can quickly die when waiting for programs to unarchive their data.

Sometimes I forget to open the jack session. Oops, just destroyed tons of work. So next time I open the session, things become a mess. Lost data. Confusion.

And unarchiving a music project to a tmp directory is insane - what if the tmp directory is on a virtual drive? Crash, and you can lose hours of work. In my case, the tmp directory is not on a fast part of the disk. Means I can't do as much before my disk can't keep up. And if your system auto-erases /tmp on boot up...and you just had a system freeze...

Currently if Qtractor crashes, all changes are overwritten when the new archive is expanded to disk. In fact if any app (or apps) crash while the session is open, I have two choices:

1) Open up the old session, and lose recently changed data
2) Rebuild the entire jack session, after moving the tmp directory to another location, opening it in Qtractor etc. painful.

Contrast this with apps that don't rely on archived data - I just open up the jack session again and BAM! It's there, just as it was before the crash.

Just as an example, Hydrogen has an option for just this case - it means *I* control my project layout, not some session-manager (whose job should be to work for me, not the other way around - file management is best left to a file manager). I can then copy the Hydrogen project over to my laptop and work on some drums at home, without having the extra wait and system strain of having Ardour, Qtractor, Kontakt, Zyn etc. all having to be open (and available) at the same time. Then I copy it back to the main project, and when I want to bring up the full project, all my local changes are there, no mucking about with messy tmp directories, or getting confused over which one is the most recently edited session.

Summary:
- I can use the exact same project in multiple sessions with ease.
- I can edit it on another system and bring it back in to the main project.
- I don't get caught using 5 times the disk space than necessary.
- It stays on the physical disk that I have designated as my work disk
- It stays within my project layout, not someone else's decision as to how I lay out my projects.
- And the possibility of losing data is in fact, way less. (Or I presume everyone who is not using jack session is constantly losing data?)
- Crashes have no effect other than (possibly) losing recent, unsaved data.

I know this was long, but I believe that there are valid reasons for this request.

chau