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The installation procedure described below is currently accurate for Windows, but not in the case of OS X, some further work is needed. This is described in the following section on Platform-Specific Instructions.

Install

Installing and getting started with XBAT is easy. If you downloaded the latest stable release, you need only to:

  1. Unzip the XBAT .zip file into a directory (folder) of your choosing.
  2. Start MATLAB.
  3. Set your working directory to the folder you unzipped XBAT to.
  4. Run xbat.m by typing xbat on the command-line.
xbat-startup__400.png

On running the command xbat you will see a splash screen that animates and tells you something about the startup process and then the 'XBAT' palette will open up when startup is done.

Platform-Specific Instructions

The installation procedure described above is currently accurate for Windows, but not in the case of OS X, some further work is needed. Here we collect any platform specific considerations we learn about.

OS X

To complete the XBAT installation procedure in OS X we must install some software libraries that XBAT MEX files depend on. This is essentially a two-step process:

  1. Install Fink, an installer is provided in the downloads section of the project website. Fink installs various command-line tools and creates a directory structure to support open-source package management and development under OS X.
  2. Use the finkcommand to install the open-source libraries required by various XBAT MEX files. This can be achieved using the following commands from the Terminal application:
    • fink install libsndfile1
    • fink install flac
    • fink install libmad
    • fink install sqlite
    Alternatively, you can also use the apt-get command to perform the installation. In this case you would execute:
    • sudo apt-get install libsndfile1
    • sudo apt-get install flac
    • sudo apt-get install libmad
    • sudo apt-get install sqlite
Note that you will be asked for your root password after the first sudo call. Using either of the suggested approaches, you will need to wait for the completion of the installation after each command.

Thanks to Martin Obrist and Jenny Tenessen for pointing out the OS X installation problem and Jenny for testing the installation procedure, in a non-developer environment.