Relative Paths in Java, omg

Question

Ok I just figured out that, what seemed to be a relative path is in reality the relative path of the starting program.
For instance:
We suppose, I got a directory: "D:/Java/Project"
in this dirrectory, there are .class files, .java files and folders which holds data like music and graphics.
normaly in all my classes the path goes like this:
for example the audio class : load every audio file from "audio/" + specific audio file name
until now everything like that worked, but only because I started the Project from within this very directory.
Assuming I got in "D:\Java" a batch file, that starts my project, like this: "java -cp ./Project MyClass"
if I run it, my code suddenly looks at "D:/Java/audio" for audio files instead of "D:/Java/Project/audio"
which means the relative path is in reality the relative path of the starting program and not from the class itself.
So how could I possibly get a relative path, telling my program, my audio class for instance again "stay where this class file is, then go to audio/ and there you got your audio files", regardless at where I start my project ?

Answer 1

If you do
new File("some/relative/path/foo.bar");it is relative to the directory you started Java in.
If you want to use the classpath (or load things from inside JAR files) you should use
this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("some/relative/path/foo.bar");using "/" regardless of your OS.
I think you can also use
this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResource(...)which gets a URL instead of a stream, and then maybe you can
open the file directly with the URL.
and you can also use
Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().get...