found drama

Recent experimenting with launchd led us to today’s (failed) experiment in the on-going “SyncTunes” project. (See previous references here and here.)

Short version: have tunesync-in.sh activate via launchd when a user logged
in, copying a master $ituneslib file over to $userlib. Then, while the user was logged in and playing songs through iTunes, tunesync-out.sh would run in the background (again, via launchd) copying each updated version of $userlib to the master $ituneslib.

So why/how did it fail?

1. For one thing, I could not verify the ...-in script was running at all. It did not appear to be running because each time we logged in, iTunes seemed to reflect the same $userlib as the previous login without any updates. (No, I didn’t try logging but…)
2. Running launchctl list indicated that ...-out was getting loaded into the list of active launchd jobs but there was no evidence that it was actually copying the updated file(s) (see previous above).
3. Considering that $ituneslib was approx 8Mb, we can make the whiney excuse that this would have been a little more memory and disk i/o intensive of an operation than we really want to perform with that kind of frequency.

Then again, maybe I’ve done something wrong here… See for yourself: tunesync-via-launchd-1.zip

currently playing: David Holmes “Gritty Shaker”

About Rob Friesel