Installing Cmus on a mac with alac support

The aim of these instructions are:

• Install Cmus on a mac via homebrew.
• Include lossless ALAC support via ffmpeg.
• Get the Mac media controls working.

Installing Cmus with ALAC support

This assumes that you already use homebrew installed.

brew install ffmpeg
brew install cmus --HEAD --with-ffmpeg

cmus --plugins

And you should see an entry for ffmpeg included in the output:

ffmpeg:
  Priority: 30
  File Types: aa aac ac3 aif aifc aiff ape au fla flac m4a m4b mka mkv mp+ mp2
mp3 mp4 mpc mpp ogg shn tak tta wav webm wma wv
  MIME Types:

To ensure that alac support is enabled, check that in the File Types of this section is: m4a - If that is missing something has gone wrong.

These instructions are based on a comment on this GitHub issue.

Media keys

To get media keys working, install using the instructions on the cmus-control GitHub page