I’ve been running Jamin, Ardour, JACK and LADSPA on OS X pretty regularly over the past year. There are DMG installers for JackOSX and Ardour on their respective websites. Hidden somewhere on the Ardour site are also some DMGes for most of the LADSPA plugins as well.
JAMin is the only one that you need to be a bit nerdy to install. However, once you get it installed it runs fine. The only bug is that you can’t send preset change messages from Ardour to it. I was writing to Jesse Chappel about fixing it, and he worked on it for a night with me but we didn’t resolve the problem yet. My suggestion is this:
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Make sure you have X11 and all the Apple Developer tools installed already. You might need this XCode stuff too, I’m not sure.
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Download and install Fink and the Fink Commander app:
http://fink.sourceforge.net/download/index.php?phpLang=en
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Use Fink to install the following (if there aren’t there already):
pkgconfig
autoconf
automake
glib2
glib2-dev
glib2-shlibs
glib-shlibs
pango1-xft2
pango1-xft2-dev
pango1-xft2-shlibs
atk1
atk1-shlibs
gtk+
gtk±data
gtk±shlibs
gtk+2
gtk+2-dev
gtk+2-shlibs
libsndfile1
libsndfile1-dev
libsndfile1-shlibs
fftw3
fftw3-shlibs
ladspa
ladspa-cmt
ladspa-dev
Please note that not all of these might be needed, but there are the ones I noticed that I have installed while cross-checking the JAMin installer notes for it’s dependencies. The whole install process should be fairly simple with Fink Commander. If you get errors later on, it might be necessary to tell Fink Commander to use “unstable” or “testing” packages. At least that is what I did on my system, so you might start by doing that and save yourself headache later
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Install the package for the SWH plugins:
http://ardour.org/files/releases/swh-plugins-0.4.15.dmg
I’m hoping that you don’t need the actual source code and headers for it, but if you do you’ll have to download the source and try to compile that as well:
wget http://plugin.org.uk/releases/0.4.15/swh-plugins-0.4.15.tar.gz
tar -xvzf swh-plugins-0.4.15.tar.gz
cd swh-plugins-0.4.15
./configure
make
make install
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You 'll need to have the JACK sourcecode and headers installed. Download the latest version here:
http://jackaudio.org/download
Then, as root in the terminal:
tar -xvzf jack-audio-connection-kit*.tar.gz (for the "", use the TAB key to autocomplete)
cd jack-audio-connection-kit
./configure
make
make install
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Download the JAMin source code:
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/
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Here’s where the fun really starts. Make sure you are root first. Then, in the terminal:
tar -xvzf jamin-.tar.gz
cd jamin-
./configure
make
make install
Now, if I or you have forgotten anything, you’ll get errors at any one of these stages. Read the messages carefully. Sometimes you might need to add some lines to ./configure to help it find the dependencies (i.e. one of the apps were installed to get this far). If there is still something missing after “./configure”, then “make” will give an error. If it does, first try to see if it’s a missing package you can install with Fink. If that doesn’t work, copy the line into Google and let it do some magic for you.
Two problems I ran into helping someone else install Jamin on OSX were these:
- PKG_CONFIG_PATH: pkg-config was having a hard time finding JACK. The solution for us was typing this in the terminal before compiling Jamin (it’s all one line!):
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/sw/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/X11R6/lib/pkgconfig
- LADSPA_PATH: getting Jamin to find the LADSPA directory was also a pain. It seems that the X11 shell doesn’t take PATH variables from any standard place that I could find, so the only solution for my friend was to make the following script:
Start by typing the following:
nano startjamin.sh
and in that file, enter:
#! /bin/bash
export LADSPA_PATH=/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/LADSPA/
/usr/local/bin/jamin
Then save and exit. You may need to adjust the location of jamin in the last line of the script if you installed jamin someplace else. Also, notice that in this case, the person didn’t compile his own LADSPA plugins, but was using them from a DMG file from the Ardour.org site. Your PATH to the LADSPA plugins may be different. Mine is /usr/local/lib/ladspa, for example. Use “locate ladspa” in the terminal to find out where your plugins are hiding.
After saving this script, type the following to make it executable:
chmod +x startjamin.sh
And whenever you want to start Jamin, type:
sh startjamin.sh
If someone has a more elegant solution to this problem, espc if they know where the X11 takes its PATH settings from, please let me know! Incidentally, on the system where I compiled and installed my own LADSPA plugins, I did not have to use this workaround.
You might also send an email to JAMin dev list, although I just checked and nobody there seems to know much about OSX:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=32548
Good luck!
derek AT THE DOMAIN umatic.nl