Few weeks ago, or maybe a month or two – I don’t remember, I spent an afternoon trying to build gnuradio-core and gr-audio on Mac OS X without using any macports. It was a casual an undocumented attempt that resulted in a compilation failure. I wasn’t surprised because I made several mistakes along the way, so I just left it an moved on.
Now with the alpha release of gqrx it was time to make another attempt, and this time I tried to do it right I have also documented the whole process. It took me few hours to get through the whole process of compiling the dependencies then GNU Radio, but to my great surprise I actually ended up with a working GNU Radio installation!
I even managed to build and run gqrx as you can see on this twitpic. Since that tweet I even found out that I can simply use the descriptive names as device names, i.e. “FUNcube Dongle V1.0” for the Funcube Dongle. Unfortunately, the OS X audio source seems to have issues with sample rates above 44.1 kHz which makes the gqrx/fcd combination useless for now. The issue is known and has actually been known since 2009.
I hope somebody will be able to fix it because I really don’t know anything about OS X audio programming and looking at the source code for the OS X audio source doesn’t make me want to learn it either.