Building Portaudio For Mac OS X

PortAudio v19 currently only compiles and runs on OS 10.4, "Tiger", and 10.5 "Leopard". Because of its heavy reliance on memory barriers, it's not clear how easy it would be to back-port PortAudio to 10.3. Leopard support requires a recent snapshot (December '07 at least) and be sure you have X Code and related tools installed in the default location.

To build PortAudio, simply use the traditional Unix "./configure && make" style build to compile. You do not need to do "make install", and we don't recommend it; however, you may be using software that instructs you to do so, in which case, obviously, you should follow those instructions. There is no X Code project for PortAudio. 

 $ ./configure && make

By default, this will create universal binaries and therefore requires the Universal SDK from Apple, included with XCode 2.1 and higher. You may want to double check that you've got a /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk folder on your system.

Other Build Options

There are a variety of other options for building PortAudio. The default described above is recommended as it is the most supported and tested; however, your needs may differ and require other options, which are described below.

Building Non-Universal Libraries

By default, PortAudio is built as a universal binary. This includes 64-bit versions if you are compiling on 10.5, Leopard. If you want a "thin", or single architecture library, you have two options:

  • build a non-universal library using configure options.
  • use lipo(1) on whatever part of the library you plan to use.

Note that the first option may require an extremely recent version of PortAudio (February 5th '08 at least).

Building with --disable-mac-universal

To build a non-universal library for the host architecture, simply use the --disable-mac-universal option with configure. 

 $ ./configure --disable-mac-universal && make

The --disable-mac-universal option may also be used in conjunction with environment variables to give you more control over the universal binary build process. For example, to build a universal binary for the i386 and ppc architectures using the 10.4u sdk (which is the default on 10.4, but not 10.5), you might specify this configure command line: 

 $ CFLAGS="-O2 -g -Wall -arch i386 -arch ppc -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.3" \
   LDFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch ppc -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.3" \
   ./configure --disable-mac-universal --disable-dependency-tracking

For more info, see Apple's documentation on the matter:

Using lipo

The second option is to build normally, and use lipo (1) to extract the architectures you want. For example, if you want a "thin", i386 library only: 

 $ lipo lib/.libs/libportaudio.a -thin i386 -output libportaudio.a

or if you want to extract a single architecture fat file: 

 $ lipo lib/.libs/libportaudio.a -extract i386 -output libportaudio.a

Building With Debug Options

By default, PortAudio on the mac is built without any debugging options. This is because asserts are generally inappropriate for a production environment and debugging information has been suspected, though not proven, to cause trouble with some interfaces. If you would like to compile with debugging, you must run configure with the appropriate flags. For example: 

 $ ./configure --enable-mac-debug && make

This will enable -g and disable -DNDEBUG which will effectively enable asserts.

Using the Library in XCode Projects

If you are planning to follow the rest of the tutorial, several project types will work. You can create a "Standard Tool" under "Command Line Utility". If you are not following the rest of the tutorial, any type of project should work with PortAudio, but these instructions may not work perfectly.

Once you've compiled PortAudio, the easiest and recommended way to use PortAudio in your XCode project is to add "<portaudio>/include/portaudio.h" and "<portaudio>/lib/.libs/libportaudio.a" to your project. Becuase "<portaudio>/lib/.libs/" is a hidden directory, you won't be able to navigate to it using the finder or the standard Mac OS file dialogs by clicking on files and folders. You can use command-shift-G in the finder to specify the exact path, or, from the shell, if you are in the portaudio directory, you can enter this command: 

 $ open lib/.libs

Then drag the "libportaudio.a" file into your XCode project and place it in the "External Frameworks and Libraries" group, if the project type has it. If not you can simply add it to the top level folder of the project.

You will need to add the following frameworks to your XCode project:

  • CoreAudio.framework
  • AudioToolbox.framework
  • AudioUnit.framework
  • CoreServices.framework

Using the Library in Other Projects

For gcc/Make style projects, include "include/portaudio.h" and link "libportaudio.a", and use the frameworks listed in the previous section. How you do so depends on your build.

Using Mac-only Extensions to PortAudio

For additional, Mac-only extensions to the PortAudio interface, you may also want to grab "include/pa_mac_core.h". This file contains some special, mac-only features relating to sample-rate conversion, channel mapping, performance and device hogging. See "src/hostapi/coreaudio/notes.txt" for more details on these features.

What Happened to Makefile.darwin?

Note, there used to be a special makefile just for darwin. This is no longer supported because you can build universal binaries from the standard configure routine. If you find this file in your directory structure it means you've got an outdated version of PortAudio. 

 $ make -f Makefile.darwin

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