Building from source

git

If you want to be at PulseAudio's bleeding edge, you need to have git installed. There's a resource for git for Mac OS X which even has a nice installer.

Source code repositories

You need to clone at least the PulseAudio and the PulseAudioOSX repositories:

$ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio
$ git clone git://github.com/zonque/PulseAudioOSX.git

The build process expects both repositories to share the same top-level directory.

MacPorts

PulseAudio depends on quite some libraries which need to be installed in order to make it build from the sources. Fortunately, Mac Ports provides all of them. Download and install it, following the instructions found on their side.

Once set up, just call the script inside the PulseAudio OSX source tree to install the necessary ports:

$ cd PulseAudioOSX/deploy
$ ./bootstrap_machine.sh

Make sure you add the path to the binaries built by Mac Ports to your $PATH variable. This is usually /opt/local/bin. And since there are some binaries provided by Mac Ports that also ship with Mac OS X in older versions, make sure the Mac Ports path comes first in the list. Otherwise the build will break.

Fink

You can use Fink too, but it does not provide universal builds of the dependencies. You can force all PulseAudio components to be built with the same architecture as Fink itself, but then audio will not work in applications of other architectures. For example, on OS X Lion, iTunes will not play audio as it is 32-bit and Fink is 64-bit on Lion. A patch to help compiling is found at https://gist.github.com/3066194; dependencies are the same as for MacPorts and can be found in bootstrap_machine.sh.

Building

In the PulseAudioOSX git repository, there is a script that should take care for the build process entirely. Again, this script requires both the PulseAudio and the PulseAudioOSX trees to be located at the same top-level directory. And of course, you need to have all dependencies satisfied as described above.

Run the build script as follows:

$ cd PulseAudioOSX/deploy
$ ./deploy.sh

When finished, you should find a zipped installer package in PulseAudioOSX/deploy/output.