Developing On Mac

Related article(s):
 * Release Process/Mac Steps to make a universal binary of Audacity for public release
 * Developing On Linux
 * Developing On Windows
 * Developer Guide

Prerequisites
You will need pkgconfig installed. By default this is not on your mac, but if you use fink or macports you may already have it in /sw/bin or /opt/bin. If you don't have it, you'll need to install fink. Then you can get it using fink with the command Alternatively you can use macports to install it.

Get Audacity from the SVN repository.

Building Universal Binary
Generally it was easier to build a native PPC or Intel version than a Universal Binary needed for public releases of Audacity.

Instructions at June 2010
These instructions were copied from an e-mail on audacity-devel in June 2010.  svn checkout http://audacity.googlecode.com/svn/audacity-src/trunk/ audacity cd audacity/mac xcodebuild -target Audacity -configuration "Release Static" WX_PREFIX= Building with a shared wxMac is possible but is not really worth the extra trouble required.

If Audacity fails to build due to missing configure macros you will need to add a file called "dirlist" to /usr/share/aclocal (dirlist should contain a list of extra places to check for m4 macros, one per line) Add the directory containing you pkg-config m4 macros - should be something like If you wish to use Xcode to build Audacity in a GUI environment, add any configuration, like WX_PREFIX, to the relevant .xcconfig file. There are four, one for each build setting. 

Working scenario building Universal Binary on PPC or Intel Mac OS X 10.5
The following scenario was reported to build from SVN HEAD as a Universal Binary on both Power PC and Intel Mac on OS X 10.5.1, using Xcode 3 and either wxWidgets 2.6.4 or 2.8.11, or the OS X 10.5.1 wxWidgets shared library.

Note that if you used OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or later there were likely to be various problems.
 * For Snow Leopard you could read this Forum topic which offered a special shell script to build wxMac. This was reported viable as at January 2011.
 * Xcode 4 no longer supports SDKs 10.4/10.5 and GCC 4.0 (or PPC for GCC 4.2). You could however use parallel Xcode 3 and Xcode 4 installations as in "Restoring PPC, SDK 10.4/10.5 and GCC 4.0 Support to Xcode4 Apps" on the Mac OS X hints site.

General Principles

 * 1 Setup wxWidgets
 * 1.1 -Create a wx directory in your audacity directory. For example:  $HOME/audacity/wx
 * 1.2 -If for some reason you are using wxMac 2.8.10, Patch the wxMac2.8.10 by doing the following


 * 1.3 -Build wxWidgets from the command line. Make a build directory inside the wxWidgets directory and from there run (without the line breaks):


 * 2. Do make followed by make install (by typing 'make', then 'make install'. If you have the wx-prefix outside of your home directory you may need 'sudo make install' instead, which will prompt you for a password.)
 * 3. Open the audacity.xcodeproj file. You should create a text file called Debug_Static.xcconfig in the same directory as the project file, and add the line to this text file to include the path you specified as --prefix when building wxMac.  For example 'WXPREFIX = /path/to/audacity/wx'.
 * 3.5. If you get an error saying that pkg-config is required, you need to add the path of pkg-config on your system to the XCode settings by adding the line 'PATH = /sw/bin:$PATH' (if you use fink) to the .xcconfig file (in the project's XCode settings folder. It may also be in /opt/bin if you use macports vs fink.


 * 4. Compile Audacity using Xcode. Open the latest Xcode project file and update it if required. In the list of targets do a "Get Info" on Audacity and Configure. You may need to change a few "User-Defined" settings. Most of the Wx ones need changing to which version of wxWidgets you've chosen and the path that you set above in --prefix when building it. You may have to change the CONFIG_STATIC and CONFIG_UNICODE in Configure. Most of the settings required for these variables can be gained from running wx-config --libs, --ld or --cflags. Also note that if using OS X 10.6 you may have to set xcode to use gcc 4.0 instead of 4.2 in your project settings.
 * 4.1 If you get an error related to libflac, you have libflac installed to /usr/local/lib, and Audacity is linking to this instead of the libflac that the project builds. To workaround this, rename /usr/local/lib/libFLAC.dylib and libFLAC++.dylib to something else.  A more proper workaround would be changing the include and linker paths to remove /usr/local/lib.

Troubleshooting tips
These tips are by Paul Livesey who builds the Audacity Nightly Builds for Mac, copied from this post on the Compiling Audacity Forum.

 Install pkg-config and make sure it's in your path; If it's not in your path Xcode won't find it and nothing will build  Ensure that you have wxMac installed and that you know where it is - you can use the libraries that Apple provide but they're old and not great  Do not try and build Audacity from the configure script, because you won't get a fully working universal binary - use the Xcode project instead. Open the Xcode project either from the command line or via the Finder. If wxMac is not installed to /usr/local you will have to set it up yourself. Either open Xcode like this: or set it in xcode via the appropriate .xcconfig file or the WX_PREFIX variable in the project  If Audacity fails to build due to missing configure macros you will need to add a file called "dirlist" to /usr/share/aclocal. The dirlist should contain a list of extra places to check for m4 macros, one per line. Add the directory containing you pkg-config m4 macros - it should be something like: 

For wxWidgets 2.6.x
 <li> add --with-expat=builtin to the above in utils/wxrc/Makefile <li> add -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 to the CXX = g++ line (25) <li> change the # define of ICONV_CHAR_CAST in src/common/strconv.cpp to:  #define ICONV_CHAR_CAST(x) ((const char **)(x))  <li> Do make followed by make install. <li> Open the audacity.xcodeproj file. You should create a text file called Debug_Static.xcconfig in the same directory as the project file, and add the line to this text file to include the path you specified as --prefix when building wxMac. For example 'WXPREFIX = /path/to/audacity/wx'. <li> If you get an error saying that pkg-config is required, you need to add the path of pkg-config on your system to the XCode settings by adding the line 'PATH = /sw/bin:$PATH' (if you use fink) to the .xcconfig file (in the project's XCode settings folder. It may also be in /opt/bin if you use macports vs fink. <li> Compile Audacity 1.3.4 using Xcode. Open the latest Xcode project file and update it if required. In the list of targets do a "Get Info" on Audacity and Configure. You may need to change a few "User-Defined" settings. Most of the Wx ones need changing to which version of wxWidgets you've chosen and the path that you set above in --prefix when building it. You may have to change the CONFIG_STATIC and CONFIG_UNICODE in Configure. Most of the settings required for these variables can be gained from running wx-config --libs, --ld or --cflags. </ol>

If further problems are encountered: please view on the.

Broken script to build Universal Binary
A was available that built  a Universal Binary version of Audacity on OS X 10.4. The script started with a wxMac-2.6.4 tarball, downloaded a fresh copy of Audacity from CVS, compiled both targets separately, merged them into the universal binary, and finally made the disk image.

As of 1 Nov 08 the script was broken, Audacity head being built using wx 2.8.10.