Cannot use SoundCard on MacOS Big Sur using DMG

[NeuroForLunch]

Expected Behavior

SoundCard sampling to work

Actual Behavior

Platform Specifications

• OS: MacOS Big Sur
• URH version: v2.9.2
• Python version: 3.9
• Installed via DMG

[NeuroForLunch]

Apparently this is due to the app not asking for microphone permission and I can't find a way to manually grant it.

I bypassed this problem by using

pip install cython
pip install pyaudio
python -m pip install --upgrade urh

and now audio works but there's another problem: it won't let me set the default frequency below 100k. I can type in a lower frequency but when I press okay and reopen settings, its back to 100k.

[andynoack]

Closed due to inactivity

[NeuroForLunch]

The issue still remains

[andynoack]

Actually this duplicates with #865. I just checked the soundcard backend limits and a center frequency of 0 (although that doesn't make sense) is possible, therefore the 100k "Bug" should only be a cosmetic issue.
To date we have no longer MAC machines in the lab, so a MAC related update from us is rather unlikely at the moment. Sorry for that! Of course we are happy to accept your Pull Request. I propose to reopen this issue for a limited time again, asking for Community support.

[NeuroForLunch]

Thank you. Is the best experience with URH on windows or linux?

[andynoack]

It was developed under linux and made compatible (as far as possible) with Windows and MAC.

[gramss]

Just gathering some useful information to fix this issue.

Based on the apple docs, one need to add the property NSMicrophoneUsageDescription to the Info.plist of the packaged application in order to access the microphone properly.

So it would probably be good to add some properties to that Info.plist around here, to fix the DMG-Release:

urh/data/pyinstaller_helper.py

Lines 60 to 66 in a9cb440

	import plistlib
	with open("pyinstaller/urh.app/Contents/Info.plist", "rb") as f:
	p = plistlib.load(f)
	p["NSHighResolutionCapable"] = True
	p["NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance"] = True
	with open("pyinstaller/urh.app/Contents/Info.plist", "wb") as f:
	plistlib.dump(p, f)

For launching urh directly from the MacOS terminal, the terminal itself should need to be whitelisted.

I also found this thread from the QT forum to be relevant:

Note that the security prompt seems to use the app name from the following Info.plist field to register the app.
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>Company Name.Application Name</string>

This python sub-function might also be interesting for generating useful content of a Info.plist.