Latest beta release of Audacity - 1.3.3 or 1.3.4?

[jbreazeale]

From http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ I see in one place that 1.3.3 is the latest beta version for Mac OS X and on the same web page in another place I see that 1.3.4 is the latest beta version. When I follow the "1.3.4 (beta)" link on the above web page I arrive at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ and it says the latest beta version for Mac OS X is 1.3.4. When I follow the "Mac OS X" link I only see mentions of versions 1.3 and 1.3.3. Is version 1.3.4 available? If so how does one get one's hands on it?

[jbreazeale]

I think what's going on is the current beta version (1.3.4) is simply not compiled for Mac OS X for some reason (technical difficulty or an administrative issue). Could someone give the official word of what's happening and when version 1.3.4 will be available on Mac OS X?

[jarome]

I need this version too, because 1.33 crashes if I look at it, and is unusable. (I reported this a long time ago). 1.25 has a truly sucky interface....

Please get the Mac version out ASAP.

[jbreazeale]

As I was working my way to the forum page to check to see if anyone had replied to my posting I spied on http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ the following text:

Note that this release is for Windows and Linux/Unix only. The latest Audacity beta for Mac OS is version 1.3.3.

I'm not sure if that text was there when I made my posting but it is clear that the situation is not a mystery.

[For your information, I have gone ahead and started using version 1.3.4 on Windows/XP in order to have access to the Truncate Silence feature. I'll patiently wait for version 1.3.4 on Mac OS X.]

[richardash1981]

1.3.4 for OS X will appear when someone volunteers to compile it and sort the remaining bugs out. There is currently no-one with a Mac actively contributing to the development of audacity, hence at the moment no Mac releases.

[jchiar]

Id like to volunteer to compile 1.3.4.

Inorder to compile this, it requires wxWidgets. Am I correct that to compile for mac os , we need wxMac instead?


From what Ive read this uses the same GUI library (wxWidget) that aMule uses.

[fraser]

Is the source code for 1.3.3 still available? I ask this because a propper compile of 1.3.4 on OSX would require a code comparison with 1.3.3 so see what changes have to be adapted for OSX.

[cuttingroom]

Id like to volunteer to compile 1.3.4.

Inorder to compile this, it requires wxWidgets. Am I correct that to compile for mac os , we need wxMac instead?

I am compiling right now with the wxAll download, seems to be working fine:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wxwindows/wxWidgets-2.8.7.tar.gz

[richardash1981]

wxwidgets is an interface specification, which aims to be the same regardless of what platform you are on. It doesn't actually consist of any code. There are then a number of implementations for different host operating systems. wxMac is the version for Mac OS, in the same way that wxGTK provides an implementation for Linux based on GTK, and wxMSW provides an implementation for Microsoft Windows.

So you want wxMac, although wxAll (which is all the builds put in one download) will I believe work. More information on building audacity can be found on the audacity wiki:
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Developing_On_Mac
for further help the best bet is to ask on the audacity-devel mailing list, because you will find more developers there than on this forum.

As far as 1.3.3 source code goes, it's available on sourceforge, however it would probably be easier to get the changes from CVS - 1.3.3 release is the Audacity_1_3_3 tag in trunk, and then HEAD is the current development code.

Given that development for Linux and Windows is continuing, 90+% of the changes won't need any attention to work on OS X, as they are either basic C++ code, or use the wxWidgets libraries. The main problems are likely to be with the build system, or with platform-specific libraries like portaudio (used for audio I/O). With this in mind I would start off just trying to compile audacity, and then test the result to see what works and what doesn't.

[allesfresser]

I have successfully compiled Audacity 1.3.4beta on a MacBook running 10.5.1. Here are a list of the changes I had to make:

* the 'dlcompat' library is no longer necessary on OS X (from 10.3 forward); the toplevel Makefile was changed to reflect this for Darwin 7 and 8 (10.3 and 10.4) but not for Darwin 9 (10.5), so it was defaulting to the setting for 10.2 and earlier. If one adds in an appropriate line in the configure machinery (look for "Darwin8"), this will solve this problem.

* libFLAC is erroring out on not finding some of the ia32 assembly optimization routines. Recompiling libflac without the optimizations will allow the Audacity compilation to pass this hurdle (albeit without those optimizations, which could make life kind of hurtful for those loading/saving FLAC-formatted data.) I don't know why the error was occurring--someone with more knowledge than me will have to look into it.

* The message catalogs are not able to be built because OS X does not include the 'gettext' package which processes them. I installed the latest version of the GNU gettext package, and it worked fine.

* The twolame library was failing during linking because the 'buffer_putbits' routine was declared with NO_DLL_INLINE in the source and header files. Removing these declarations and recompiling twolame keeps the errors from occurring.

* There is an existing install of wxWidgets included with 10.5; however, this is not built the way that Audacity needs it, so you need to compile your own version following the instructions in Audacity's 'compile.txt' file (found in the 'mac' subdirectory of the source tree). I advise, however, that you don't install it to /usr/local as it instructs, but in another directory of your choosing, such as a directory living under your home directory. (wxWidgets will be statically linked with Audacity anyway, so the nonstandard location shouldn't matter.) To enable Audacity's build process to find your custom build, you need to define some environment variables:

Assuming your custom build of wxWidgets is in "/Users/you/wxWidgets":

Code: Select all

export PATH=/Users/you/wxWidgets/bin:$PATH
export LDFLAGS="-L/Users/you/wxWidgets/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/Users/you/wxWidgets/include"

Do this before you run the 'configure' command for Audacity.

I think those are all the changes; if anything else returns to my mind I will edit this post to add it.

The application runs and seems to function nicely, including importing and exporting MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP2 and WAV files.

UPDATE: I was also able to build Audacity 1.3.4beta on an Intel iMac running 10.4.11; the twolame problem didn't appear on this build, and of course the dlcompat hack isn't needed either on 10.4. The libflac problem seems like it's the only obstacle. I don't have a PPC machine available to compile on and I am not sure how to make Audacity do a Universal build; if anyone wants to post how this is done I'll be glad to try it. There is a minor visual glitch that I can see in the Preferences window--the group boxes extend a little bit to the left into the list of preferences. But it doesn't affect any functionality.

UPDATE 2: I did a clean build on the 10.4.11 iMac, and the only change I had to make in the source tree (apart from installing gettext and wxMac, of course) is the following:

Code: Select all

--- lib-src/libflac/configure-orig      2008-01-04 12:46:56.000000000 -0800
+++ lib-src/libflac/configure   2008-01-04 12:15:13.000000000 -0800
@@ -19520,7 +19520,7 @@
   enableval="$enable_asm_optimizations"
   asm_opt=no
else
-  asm_opt=yes
+  asm_opt=no
fi;


(Yes, I know I should change configure.in since it's the source code for configure. But I don't know the autoconf system well enough to do that... and this works.)

Does anyone know how to get a build submitted to the official place so the public can try it out? I'll submit either one of these Intel builds if someone can tell me how.

UPDATE 3: A friend allowed me to attempt the build on a Dual G5, and it went smoothly with no changes required to the source tree. (Not surprising since the ia32 assembly routines were the only problem with the Intel build on 10.4...) Next I'm going to attempt a Universal build, using the instructions at http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2005/tn2137.html.