Hey all,
I'm about to start making an instrument plugin that allows the user to import audio files which can be triggered and manipulated using MIDI data.

I was wondering how plugins of this nature generally handle the location of the imported audio file. I like the idea that when the user adds the file to the plugin it creates a copy of it within a 'project' directory of some sort, similar to that of when you import audio files into a DAW project.
Is that a common way for plugins to behave?

i use relative paths with respect to the plugin-dll. that's plain and simple and sufficient for those little single-cycles that i currently need to import. if you have a huge amount of samples, it is probably more user-friendly to let the user specify a library path. i don't currently do that, but if i would, i would maintain this library-path in a preferences file which itself should be in the same directory as the plugin dll (or some subfolder thereof). as for creating your own copies in a project folder: i don't think that there's a way to inquire the project folder from the DAW.

I thought as much. It would be nice, but I'd imagine it would complicate things when the DAW tries to do certain things, for example, removing unused audio files.
The idea of creating a global audio files directory for the plugin seems like a good way of doing it though.