Building Universal Binaries On Mac

Universal Binaries are only really needed for public releases of Audacity. If you are just building Audacity for development purposes, it is recommended to follow the instructions at Developing On Mac to compile a native Intel or PPC build. Developing On Mac also contains some fundamentals required to understand steps in this article, such as building wxMac and what WX_PREFIX is.

Related article(s): See Release Process/Mac for the latest information on building universal binaries for public release

These are the instructions copied from an email on audacity-devel in June 2010.

1. svn checkout http://audacity.googlecode.com/svn/audacity-src/trunk/ audacity

2. cd audacity/mac

3. xcodebuild -target Audacity -configuration "Release Static" WX_PREFIX=<location of wxMac>

   Building with a shared wxMac is possible but is not really worth the extra trouble required.

   wxMac needs patching to work properly with Audacity (a few bug fixes). The patches are found in the mac directory of the Audacity sources.
4. 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)
5. Add the directory containing you pkg-config m4 macros - should be something like
   /PATH PKG-CONFIG INSTALLED TO/share/aclocal
6. 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.