You could try using a while-loop to wait for the service to launch:

<!-- language: bash -->

 #!/bin/sh

 # If the notification daemon isn't running then launch it
 if ! pgrep -f "notification-daemon" > /dev/null; then
 /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon &
 done

 # Wait for the notification daemon to finish launching
 while ! pgrep -f "notification-daemon" > /dev/null; do

 # Set optional delay
 sleep 0.1

 done

 # Play awesome song (do-doop da-doop doop-doop-doop...)
 notify-send "Take 5"
 aplay /home/Me/Music/brubek-clip.wav

This should guarantee that you don't continue until the daemon is running (e.g. if for some reason it takes longer than your 0.5 second sleep).

I did a little bit of web-searching for similar posts and found a few that seem relevant:

- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5277/how-do-i-tell-a-script-to-wait-for-a-process-to-start-accepting-requests-on-a-po

- [Bash wait for process start
](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19326245/bash-wait-for-process-start)

- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/240208/shell-script-to-process-service-restart-procedure

- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/103862/how-do-i-wait-on-a-program-started-in-another-shell

These all seem to follow the same basic approach - use a loop to wait until the desired condition is met.