Building On Mac

This guide will help you establish a working development environment for Audacity on OS X Snow Leopard, Lion, or Mountain Lion. You may use the environment for general development as well, but the intent is to get you started building Audacity as quickly and easily as possible. To that end, the steps detailed below will concentrate on Audacity and general development will be left up to you.

Download Xcode 3.2.6

To download Xcode, you will need to register at the Apple Developer site:

http://developer.apple.com

Once registered, the available downloads are located here:

http://developer.apple.com/downloads

Xcode 3.2.6 is the last version that (officially) supports the PPC architecture and the macosx10.4u SDK. Unless you're building release versions, the PPC support isn't absolutely necessary, but the SDK is required.

Enter “Xcode 3.2.6” in the search box on the left, press enter, and download the “Xcode 3.2.6 and iOS SDK 4.3” dmg:

Download Xcode 4.5.2

Snow Leopard users may skip this step.

NOTE: You may choose to install other versions of Xcode, but at the time this guide was written, 4.5.2 was the latest and other versions may not work as outlined here.

Enter “Xcode 4.5.2” in the search box on the left, press enter, and download the “Xcode 4.5.2” dmg:

Enter “Command Line Tools” in the search box on the left, press enter and download the “Command Line Tools” dmg that corresponds to your version of OS X:

Download MacPorts

Two build utilities, cmake and pkgconfig, will need to be installed and MacPorts or Fink are the easiest way to get them. This guide will use MacPorts so you will need to make adjustments if you choose to use Fink. Download the version of MacPorts which matches your OS X version from:

http://www.macports.org/install.php

Download wxWidgets

You must download the wxMac version 2.8.12 of wxWidgets from:

http://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/

Download the File:Build wxwidgets.gz script that will be used to build wxWidgets for use with Audacity. Make sure you save the file as "build_wxwidgets.gz". Safari will automatically uncompress the file, others may not.

Install Xcode 3.2.6

Locate the Xcode 3.2.6 dmg, xcode_3.2.6_and_ios_sdk_4.3.dmg, on your system and double click it to have Finder verify and mount it:

The “Xcode and iOS SDK” installer checks the version of OS X that is currently running and it will not work on any version above Snow Leopard. However, this version check can be bypassed by starting the installation from the command line.

NOTE: It is advisable to have all OS X updates applied to your system before installing Xcode 3.2.6. This is especially important for Lion users as the installation will fail.

Open a Terminal window and start the installation by entering the following commands:

export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1 open "/Volumes/Xcode and iOS SDK/Xcode and iOS SDK.mpkg"

This will start the installation while bypassing the version check:

Proceed through the various installation pages until you get to the “Custom Install” page:

Open the Essentials item by clicking the arrow:

The minimum required options are “Unix Development” and “Mac OS X 10.4 SDK”, but if you're running Snow Leopard, you may elect to install everything. On Lion or above, you will not be able to use “System Tools” and may choose to use the “iOS SDK” and “Documentation” from Xcode 4.5.2: