Thanks for the tip on backgrounding the process and redirecting the output. I’ll incorporate that idea into the next version.

/ac

“”"”getting the “Save Freedb Results” AppleScript to call the itunes_freedb ruby script (currently doesn’t work for reasons unknown)”"”

When you run a script from iTunes’ script menu, iTunes can’t handle Apple events sent by other processes until that script finishes. This isn’t a problem for menu scripts that send events directly to iTunes (e.g. AppleScripts, PyOSA scripts), but here you’re using ‘do shell script’ to run an external ruby process which then tries to send events to iTunes – and so they end up blocking each other.

However, since calling ‘do shell script’ is the last thing your AppleScript does, you can get around this problem by having ‘do shell script’ return immediately without waiting for the ruby script to complete first. Just redirect its stdout and stderr to /dev/null, e.g.:

do shell script “your-command > /dev/null 2>&1 &”

If your Ruby script needs to report errors or anything else to the user, you can use the OSAX module and Standard Additions’ display_dialog command to pop up a dialog in iTunes; see the OSAX manual for details.

HTH