Are macOS binaries available anywhere?

[PierBover]

Unfortunately installing packages with brew has become a nightmare.

Building the binary on macOS requires, again, installing packages with brew that also fail for one or another reason.

[aerogus]

Can you add some information about your MacOS version ?

With MacOS Monterey 12.5.1 here are the commands I run to install the program :

% brew tap bbc/audiowaveform
==> Tapping bbc/audiowaveform
Cloning into '/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/bbc/homebrew-audiowaveform'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 83, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (19/19), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (13/13), done.
remote: Total 83 (delta 10), reused 14 (delta 6), pack-reused 64
Receiving objects: 100% (83/83), 32.66 KiB | 10.89 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (43/43), done.
Tapped 1 formula (15 files, 52.4KB).

and

% brew install audiowaveform
==> Downloading https://github.com/bbc/audiowaveform/archive/1.6.0.tar.gz
Already downloaded: /Users/gseznec/Library/Caches/Homebrew/downloads/75924a33605948308452da18d3f3737a9b3d95be988c1c74b9810e4951c3a882--audiowaveform-1.6.0.tar.gz
==> Installing audiowaveform from bbc/audiowaveform
==> cmake .. -DENABLE_TESTS=0 -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang++
==> make install
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/audiowaveform/1.6.0: 8 files, 574.8KB, built in 24 seconds
==> Running `brew cleanup audiowaveform`...
Disable this behaviour by setting HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP.
Hide these hints with HOMEBREW_NO_ENV_HINTS (see `man brew`).

the program is stores here :

% which audiowaveform
/usr/local/bin/audiowaveform

[PierBover]

Sorry I don't remember the details but at first the installation with brew wouldn't complete. When it did complete I couldn't get the binaries to run. I uninstalled brew, reinstalled it from scratch, etc. Nothing worked. I also tried building myself with make but I couldn't get that to work either. I'm on Big Sur.

Brew has become extremely unreliable for me in the past years and this was the drop that spilled the glass, so to speak.

I ended up using FFMPEG to extract the waveform data.

FFMPEG provides the macOS binaries so I only need to copy those into /usr/local/bin/. And since I was using FFMPEG already to encode audio, it made even more sense to use that. Another benefit is that FFMPEG allows you to compress the audio to get better waveforms.