Execute a folder action on a schedule

In my and others' experience, Folder Actions are unreliable, especially with large numbers of changes. So the problem you're facing is not specific to your system, but a rather common one.

I suggest you rewrite your script into one that receives a folder as input, and performs the Markdown transformation on all files within. Have it trigger automatically whenever a file is written to by a launchd job, with the parent folder specified in the WatchPaths rule.

Since most programs on OS X perform atomic saves and thereby replace the previous file instead of simply modifying its contents, the folder will also be updated and the job will be triggered reliably.

Markdown transformation also shouldn't be too time consuming, and you can always ensure only to transform files using your script that were changed in the last X minutes.

A couple of solutions come to mind.

1. Have your Automator script move the files to the trash (or another folder on dropbox, like "Added to iTunes") after it copies them to the Automatically added folder.

2. Set your automator script to check your dropbox for files every x minutes (e.g., 15). Tell it to only copy the files that were added in the last x - 1 minutes (e.g., 14, or 14:59). The Spotlight metadata element you want is kMDItemDateAdded.

3. Far and away the easiest solution is to use Hazel.