Got a call recently for a post house that wants to have a dashboard of what input devices are running in Logic Pro across a fleet of audio edit bays. Logic still uses a standard .plist format to store settings in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.logic10.plist. So it’s easy enough to read and write settings. There’s a lot in there but let’s focus on just the Current Hardware, which is in a dictionary called AudioHardwarePreferences. We can find that by running the defaults command on the defaults domain com.apple.logic10 followed by the dictionary name:
defaults read com.apple.logic10 AudioHardwarePreferencesThe output then shows us the last few and some other information (e.g. we can actually use that DeviceID to control things using the core audio frameworks):
{
CurrentCoreAudioDeviceID = 97;
CurrentCoreAudioDeviceName = "External Headphones";
CurrentCoreAudioDeviceUID = BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice;
CurrentCoreAudioInputDeviceID = 108;
CurrentCoreAudioInputDeviceName = "RODE NT-USB";
CurrentCoreAudioInputDeviceUID = "AppleUSBAudioEngine:RODE Microphones:RODE NT-USB:14210000:2";
CurrentCoreAudioInputModelUID = "RODE NT-USB:19F7:0003";
CurrentCoreAudioModelUID = "Codec Output";
LastUsedCoreAudioDeviceNames = (
"External Headphones",
"RODE NT-USB",
"Scarlett Solo USB",
PA248,
"MacBook Pro Speakers"
);
LastUsedCoreAudioInputDeviceNames = (
"RODE NT-USB",
"External Microphone",
"Scarlett Solo USB",
"MacBook Pro Microphone"
);
}To then parse out just the current audio device we need to see what the CurrentCoreAudioInputDeviceName key in the AudioHardwarePreferences dictionary is, so we can turn to PlistBuddy for that operation:
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "print 'AudioHardwarePreferences':CurrentCoreAudioInputDeviceName" ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.logic10.plistThe output in my case would then just be:
RODE NT-USB