Does anyone know if there is a working port of Aldrin for OSX?
No one?
Well, i at least could check out Renoise in the meantime, not exactly what i’m looking for with Aldrin but they overlap in certain disciplines, also a crossplatform release btw.
pardon my ignorance, but looking at the Aldrin site and browsing the code it seems to be written entirely in python so it should work just dandy on OS X.
So what am I missing?
I’m not at my mac right now so I can’t try it out, but I’ll give it a go sometime over the weekend.
In any case it looks pretty cool, thanks for bring it up. I hadn’t heard of it before now.
Tell me if it worked for you!
That’s funny! At fist I was thinking, “What’s up the the name”? then I saw that it’s sort of a remake of Buzz, then Buzz Aldrin, and it finally made sense. 
I used to make music with Buzz back in like… 1997 or something like that. It’s a really great and fun to use program, but that was a long time ago. 
Anyway, I think that just because it’s written in Python doesn’t mean it will run on OS X if it is calling code from external libraries. Specifically, the Audio system of Linux (OpenAl), which is used in OS X, is wrapped up inside of Core Audio. I think you would need to rewrite the audio connection library to support AU at that point… Actually, now that I think about it, that might not be the case, as long at you had the same OpenAL libraries and all the same stuff was exposed in within Darwin, you might be able to recompile their audio library (take a look at the “Armstrong” link) for OS X and it might work… Im not sure about that but to be sure, it’s not a trivial undertaking. 
OK, I just checked and yes, OpenAL is totally available in OS X starting with Tiger. So yes, you should be able to recompile the Armstrong Library for OS X and it might work after that… As long as there aren’t any other non-cross platform libraries being used in Aldrin but I doubt that.
Still a lot to do these days but if when i find time to i’ll try it and report if it works. If someone tries it out before it would be nice if he/she could post if it worked or not.
Well it took a little bit of doing but I finally got Aldrin installed and working on my Mac (dual G5 ppc 10.4.11)
I haven’t played with it much, just did a quick check to see if some basic functionality worked. I got it making some sound so that’s good!
I had to install python, scons, wxpython and pygtk. I installed all these from MacPorts.
I also had to install libsndfile, libsamplerate and fftw. I installed these from source, although I think there is MacPorts for fftw.
Once all that was installed I was able to build and install libzzub and pyzzub. And then finally Aldrin.
There were a few issues that I had to work around to get all this going so if any one is interested I’d be happy to share. I didn’t really take the time to do a proper fix for the issues I found, just quick and dirty hacks.
-raleigh
Yep, me…PM? :O)
There wasn’t anything too serious that needed tweaking.
iirc, libsndfile and libsamplerate just needed a couple minor source tweaks in the source.
There were a couple of places with extra #pragma statements so I just removed those. I found them just from looking at the error message generated during the build.
I had to build and install fftw twice. Once with options for double precision and once for single precision(configure --enable-float). Not sure if there is a way to do both at the same time. zzub needs both libraries but only does pre-build checks for one. THere are a lot of other options you can used with fftw (enable threads, SSE, altivec, etc) that might improve performance but I did not play around to much with those.
While installing py-gtk from MacPorts I ran into an error during one the pre-req package installs (can’t remember right now). It complained about being unable to access a folder in /usr/local/share/??? so I just manually created it and re-ran the installer.
I expected more trouble from libzzub with using CoreAudio’s OpenAL, but once I had all the pre-requisite packages installed everything went well. It automagically detected CoreAudio and built without any more issues.
One other thing I found while playing around with Aldrin is that the context-menu in the Router View tab didn’t work. It seems there was some problem with py-gtk being able to load an icon (.svg) file. To work around that I just commented out the offending line of code.
I didn’t install OSS, JACK, or ASIO, but I would assume that they would work just fine since they build and run on OS X.
I’ll try and post some more detailed info tonight when I get home.[/url]
Cool!