diff --git a/cmulab_elan_extension.cmdi b/cmulab_elan_extension.cmdi
index 6da4d8f..2ea42d9 100644
--- a/cmulab_elan_extension.cmdi
+++ b/cmulab_elan_extension.cmdi
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
     </Resources>
     <Components>
         <RECOGNIZER>
-            <recognizer recognizerType="local" runLinux="bash -il ./cmulab_elan_extension.sh" runMac="bash -il ./cmulab_elan_extension.sh" runWin="cmd /c .\cmulab_elan_extension.bat"
+            <recognizer recognizerType="local" runLinux="bash -il ./cmulab_elan_extension.sh" runMac="bash -il ./cmulab_elan_extension_macos.bash" runWin="cmd /c .\cmulab_elan_extension.bat"
                     info="CMU Linguistic Annotation Backend">CMU Linguistic Annotation Backend</recognizer>
             <!--<documentation icon16="MPG_logo_16.png">cmulab_elan_extension.html</documentation>-->
             <documentation>cmulab_elan_extension.html</documentation>
diff --git a/cmulab_elan_extension_macos.bash b/cmulab_elan_extension_macos.bash
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bf2adcf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/cmulab_elan_extension_macos.bash
@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+#!/bin/bash -x
+#
+# It seems that recognizer processes invoked by ELAN don't inherit any regular
+# environmental variables (like PATH), which makes it difficult to track down
+# where both Python and ffmpeg(1) might be.  These same processes also have
+# their locale set to C.  This implies a default ASCII file encoding.
+
+export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
+export PYTHONIOENCODING="utf-8"
+
+# change to cmulab_elan_extension dir
+#cd "$(dirname "$0")"
+./macos/cmulab_elan_extension