Steps needed for M1 compatibility

[corder]

Hello folks,

I am having a bit hard time understanding the steps of compiling for M1 machines.
What is needed to compile vst3, AU, and AAX plugins for M1 native?

After compiling it for M1, is it going to work on the other none-M1 machines?

[DavidCNAntonia]

Xcode will make a universal binary which contains both intel and arm builds. You don’t need to do anything special!

[daniel]

But when you build from Xcode, you need to make sure to select “Build for all Macs” instead of “Build for my Mac”.

Also for AAX you need to disable ARM for time being, see the other threads about AAX:

How to add values for Excluded Architectures from Projucer?

Unless/until Avid gives us native M1 (arm) support, we really need to be able to exclude AAX from building with it. The only way I can see to do that currently is to have two separate .jucer projects, one for AAX only (without arm support) and one for VST3+AU (with arm support), each of which generates its own Xcode project (in separate sub-folders). That’s especially true if using a build system like ours, which simply executes xcodebuild with the “all” configuration. With over 15 plugins to up…

And if you need external libraries it becomes easily complicated…

[rory]

As @daniel says, things quickly get complicated if you are using any external libraries. I just spent the best part of a week rebuilding a load of 3rd party libraries for use in my applications.

[corder]

Thank you very much for this quick responses.
AAX did not surprise me

[DavidCNAntonia]

@daniel

But when you build from Xcode, you need to make sure to select “Build for all Macs” instead of “Build for my Mac”.

I’m not sure you even need to do that. I’ve tested both build for all and build for my and the binary comes out the same size on release mode. However the apple documentation does say that when building for a debug build it will only build for the current architecture to save time - but no one should be releasing a debug build anyway!

I think when set to release it follows the project settings no matter what:

Please correct me if I am mistaken however!

@Rory yeah, it took me a while to get going with the AAX library because of the whole universal binary thing. For standard JUCE stuff its nice and straightforward though!

[rory]

@daniel

But when you build from Xcode, you need to make sure to select “Build for all Macs” instead of “Build for my Mac”.

You can build using either option, but you can only debug using the ‘Build for my Mac’ option right?

[ans]

Removing arm64 architecture only from the AAX target in the Xcode project did it for me. That builds the AAX plugin for Intel only, while all other plugins are built as univeral binaries.

[ArtVista]

Where can I find the setting “Build for all Macs”?

[anthony-nicholls]

On my version of Xcode it seems to be called “Any Mac” now. However, as above, it’s rare you actually need to change this.

[railjonrogut]

To debug locally you have to switch to “My Mac” to run the build from XCode.

Rail

[ArtVista]

Thanks Guys,

I am not very experienced with Xcode so I appreciate your help. I can only run Xcode 14.2 because my Mac is on MacOS Monterey, and I can’t go higher. So in Xcode 14.2 the setting is “Apple Silicon, Intel”. However, in the description on the page linked below the setting should be “64-bit Intel and ARM” from Xcode 12.2 and forward. Are these two settings both indicating a universal plugin build for m1, M2 and Intel processors? Am I missing something? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/building-a-universal-macos-binary

[anthony-nicholls]

In this context Apple Silicon and ARM are the same thing, as is Intel and 64-bit Intel.

[ArtVista]

Thanks Anthony,
I appreciate it!

/Hans