M1xxx

[!NOTE] Official snapshot builds of Mixxx for Apple Silicon are now available for download here. These are recommended for most users and can also be installed via Homebrew:

brew tap homebrew/cask-versions
brew install --cask mixxx-snapshot

Unofficial snapshot builds of the free and open source DJ software Mixxx for macOS (arm64/Apple Silicon, x86-64/Intel) and Linux (x86-64).

Installation

Get the most recent binaries from GitHub Releases here.

Alternatively you can install m1xxx via Homebrew using

brew tap fwcd/fwcd
brew install --cask m1xxx

This has the additional advantage of making it easy to upgrade or remove m1xxx.

Background

Mixxx traditionally only provided builds for x86-64 macOS. While these run fine under Rosetta 2, native Mixxx builds for arm64 run at roughly half the CPU load and feel noticeably more snappy than the x86-64 version.

This repo provides native builds for arm64 that are cross-compiled from GitHub's x86-64 Actions runners.

Upstreaming process

Both the mixxx and the vcpkg branch now use the official upstream revisions.

Building natively on Apple Silicon (arm64 macOS) hosts

While the CI workflows in this repo mainly deal with the case of cross-compiling Mixxx from x86-64 macOS runners to arm64, it is also possible to compile directly from an arm64 macOS (Apple Silicon) host.

First, make sure to have Homebrew installed and the submodules in this repo checked out (using git submodule update). To install the system dependencies, run:

scripts/install-macos-deps

To compile and install Mixxx's dependencies into vcpkg run:

scripts/bootstrap-vcpkg
scripts/install-vcpkg-deps

[!NOTE] If vcpkg produces a 'missing Python' error message, make sure to have python on your PATH, e.g. by symlinking it to python3 with ln -s /opt/homebrew/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python.

To build Mixxx, run:

scripts/configure-mixxx
scripts/build-mixxx

Credits

Thanks to daschuer for the work involved in backporting the relevant Qt patches, parts of the CI workflows and assistance in building the dependencies!