Requirements for OS X

Native (X11-free) Version

If you are planning to use a "native" (X11-free) version of Ardour on OS X, you should probably read this instead. The native version comes with 117 LADSPA plugins already, so you can skip the part about plugins below.

X11 Version

You don't need a lot of stuff to get Ardour running on OS X. You will need:

  • At least OS X 10.4.0
  • Apple's X11 is downloadable, but Tiger users will need to install the version from the Tiger DVD. Please note: you must install X11 in addition to the X11 SDK. For some reason, the X11 SDK is labelled "X11" by Apple, and many OS X users believe they have installed X11 by simply installing the SDK. To verify that you've installed X11, check for the presence of Applications -> Utilities -> X11
  • JACK (either JackOSX or "regular" JACK.) In general, we recommend JackOSX for new users, specifically version 0.76 or above.

NOTE: particularly on Leopard, users have been reporting incredibly long startup times for the first use of the program. Delays of many minutes (3-8 minutes) have been seen. We know what causes this, but at present do not know how to fix it. This behaviour does not occur with older versions of Apple's X11.app on Tiger. We hope to correct this in the future. You will not see this delay on later uses of Ardour.

Other things you might want

An alternative GUI for JACK

To configure JACK, you can either use Ardour itself, or JackPilot, which comes with the JackOSX package, or QJackCtl. Each has it owns benefits and disadvantages. A recent release of QJackCtl for Intel Leopard (or Tiger) and JackOSX ≥ 0.77 is QJackCtl-0.3.2-intel.dmg. An older Universal release of QJackCtl for Intel and PPC macs with Tiger or Leopard is available here: QJackCtl-0.2.22.dmg. Please read the included README carefully for initial setup instructions, it is very important.

Plugins

Because ardour does not come with any effect plugins, we are providing installable packages for some of the top LADSPA plugins sets. Note that these plugins were developed independently and documentation for them is included in the disk images and available on the web. The source code for all of these plugins is available on their respective homepages.

The following are all universal binaries for Intel and PPC macs.