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wincent Synergy Advance: total audio control

Synergy Advance links

Universal

Tiger Compatible

Frequently Asked Questions

What is "synergyd"?

"synergyd" is a tiny background application that monitors the system to see when iTunes is launched. If you have "Auto-launch Synergy Advance when iTunes is launched" checked in the Synergy Advance "General" preference pane then synergyd will ensure that Synergy Advance opens whenever you start iTunes. Great care has been taken to ensure that synergyd works efficiently and uses almost no resources; if you look at synergyd in the Activity Monitor application you'll see that it indicates 0% CPU usage, and it uses about 250KB of memory (as measured by the "leaks" command line tool). The "d" in "synergyd" stands for daemon, which is a common term in the UNIX world for faceless background applications with which the user does not interact directly and which consume very few resources. On a standard Mac OS X install there are a large number of daemons, such as syslogd, kextd, httpd, configd, notifyd, ntpd, diskarbitrationd and potentially others depending on your operating system version and configuration. You should be able to run synergyd with no negative impact on your computing experience.

How do I activate or deactivate synergyd?

There are a number of options that you can set in the Synergy Advance "General" preference pane that you can use to control when and how synergyd is launched (or not launched).

If you have chosen "Auto-launch Synergy Advance when iTunes is launched" in the Synergy Advance preferences then synergyd will be added to your login items and will run automatically whenever you login. Whenever you launch iTunes, synergyd will also cause Synergy Advance to launch. When you quit Synergy Advance synergyd will continue running in the background and watching for when iTunes launches. You can prevent this behaviour by unchecking the "Auto-launch Synergy Advance when iTunes is launched". When you uncheck this option synergyd will be removed from your login items.

Another option that you will find in the Synergy Advance preferences is "Launch Synergy Advance at login". When this is checked Synergy Advance adds itself to your login items and will be run whenever you initiate a session. You can uncheck the option to remove Synergy Advance from your login items.

A third related option is "Auto-quit Synergy Advance when iTunes quits".

These three options are completely independent of each other; you can elect to have all turned on, all turned off, or any one or two turned on at a time. In this way you can tailor Synergy Advance to match your usage patterns.

What do I do if Synergy Advance or synergyd don't auto-launch like I expect?

If you notice that Synergy Advance or synergyd are not auto-launching like you expect them to it may be that the entries in your login items are out of date. Synergy Advance does check the login items whenever you launch it and attempts to repair them so that they always match the settings you've made in the Synergy Advance preferences. Even so a it is possible that the items can get out of date. There are a number of possible causes:

  • You ran Synergy Advance from one location (such as the Synergy Advance disk image) and then copied or moved it to another location (such as your "Applications" folder) then the login items may point to the old location.
  • You or someone else manually edited the login items.
  • Another program on your system may have attempted to modify your login items and in the process removed Synergy Advance or synergyd from the list.
  • Your login items file (~/Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist) is corrupt.

In all cases the solution is straightforward. In the Synergy Advance "General" preference pane do the following:

  • If synergyd is not launching at login uncheck "Auto-launch Synergy Advance when iTunes is launched" and then recheck it. This will remove any stale entries from your login items and create a new entry for synergyd.
  • If Synergy Advance is not launching at login uncheck "Launch Synergy Advance at login" and then recheck it. Again this will remove any stale entries in the login items and create a new entry for Synergy Advance.