This repository is a clone of the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) repository at https://alac.macosforge.org with added files to enable it to be built using GNU autotools. Use it to build and install the ALAC library libalac.

The added files are based on work done by Tiancheng "Timothy" Gu in his repository https://github.com/TimothyGu/alac with some changes. Many thanks to him for his work. This respository is bare-bones – for Visual Studio or Debian packaging support or for man pages, please go to Timothy's repository.

Note: In the rest of the note, a command prefixed with # means that it must be executed in superuser mode. The $ prefix means it should be executed in regular user mode.

Building libalac requires a number of tools, such a the compiler and linker, git and more. Ensure they are already in place by running the following command. If the tools are already in place, it'll do no harm.

# apt-get update
# apt-get install build-essential git autoconf automake libtool

To download, build and install libalac do the following:

• Clone the repository and cd into the folder:

$ git clone https://github.com/mikebrady/alac.git
$ cd alac

• Configure the build and make the library:

$ autoreconf -fi
$ ./configure
$ make

The autoconfigure command may take a long time. You may get a warning which you can ignore:

aclocal: warning: couldn't open directory 'm4': No such file or directory

• Install the library:

# make install

To make the library visible during compilation, you need to tell ld about it. Be careful here – if you are on FreeBSD, the Linux command will mess up your system. On Linux only, use the following command:

# ldconfig

The library can be found and linked to via pkg-config – the module name is alac.

Thus:

PKG_CHECK_MODULES([ALAC], [alac], [LIBS="${ALAC_LIBS} ${LIBS}"])

should work in a configure.ac file. If you are using AC_CHECK_LIB, something like this will work:

AC_CHECK_LIB([alac], [BitBufferInit], , AC_MSG_ERROR(Apple ALAC Decoder support requires the alac library!))

On FreeBSD you must add the location of the alac.pc file to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH, if it exists, and define it otherwise. Here is what you do if it doesn't already exist:

$ PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig"
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH