Help building on Mac with latest ffmpeg

The build instructions for Linux say that Audacity can be built with ffmpeg up to the latest ffmpeg 3.3 and describes what to put in the ./configure command line and how to link with the system ffmpeg libraries.

Does anyone know how to either do the equivalent configuration changes in the Xcode project on the Mac, or alternatively how to build Audacity on the Mac using configure and make instead of the Xcode project? The current instructions for building on the Mac only talk about using the Xcode project and building with older versions of ffmpeg. My goal is to get Audacity on my Mac to use the latest ffmpeg like can be done on Linux, and I don’t care whether that is accomplished using a command line build or using Xcode.

I am running Mac OS X 10.12.4 (Sierra) and use homebrew for most things. I was successful at building Audacity from github source by following the build instructions, including copying the 10.6 SDK from an old version of Xcode, but that only accepts older ffmpeg libraries,

But you are on Mac.

And Audacity does not officially support Homebrew. It can create library problems when building Audacity. So you may have to build Audacity with mostly local libraries (and of course make a separate build of wxWidgets just for Audacity).

On Mac you can already import Apple formats into Audacity using the built-in QuickTime importer. So if the “need” for latest FFmpeg is only for export, simply find a suitable FFmpeg binary and export using External Program. That works in Audacity as shipped with any version of FFmpeg.



Gale

Thank you. I had not noticed the external binary option in export. That does look like it would handle anything I would want to do, without requiring a special build of Audacity.

If I ever wanted to build Audacity against a modern FFmpeg on Mac, I guess I would try building FFmpeg from source code (you may have some of the dependencies already given you have Homebrew), build wxWidgets from source code, then configure Audacity using --disable-dynamic-loading.

I don’t happen to know of anyone who has done it.


Gale