SdPlayer is tape group software written by Keith Rubow, available at https://www.krubow.com/Downloads.htm. The site makes SdPlayer available for Windows and Linux, but not for Mac OS. However, it's possible to build the program for MacOS.

To do so:

  1. Download the source (SdPlayerSrc200.zip) and unzip it into a directory.
  2. Download and install Qt from https://www.qt.io/download
  3. Download and install VLC from https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
  4. Apply sdplayer.patch, which is attached to this wiki page (find the paper clip icon near the top-left of the page).
  5. From the directory with the patched source, run the following, adjusting the Qt path if necessary:
    ~/Qt/5.11.2/clang_64/bin/qmake -config release && make -j4 && cp filetypes.txt *.png     SdPlayer.app/Contents/MacOS && install_name_tool -add_rpath /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/lib SdPlayer.app/Contents/MacOS/SdPlayer
  6. Download Music.icns, attached to this wiki page, and save it to SdPlayer.app/Contents/Resources in the build directory. This file is a set of icons both scaled-up and scaled-down from Music.png. (I'm not sure if/when the higher-resolution icons are ever used, but if you end up seeing blurry icons, that's why.)
  7. Run ~/Qt/5.11.2/clang_64/bin/macdeployqt SdPlayer.app -dmg

You will now have an SdPlayer.dmg file, which you can use as normal. If you give the .dmg file to someone else, they will need to install VLC, but none of the other above steps will be necessary. By default, no keyboard shortcuts are configured, so you'll need to configure some. The default shortcuts, which many people are accustomed to, can be found at https://www.krubow.com/Downloads/SdPlayer200/sdplayer.html#L2482 (although consider only configuring the first key corresponding to each command).

Thanks to Rachel Chasin for writing up an initial set of instructions at https://phantomcolumnist.blogspot.com/2014/09/installing-sdplayer-200-on-osx.html, which this set of instructions is based upon.

Alex Dehnert also has a GitHub repo that builds SdPlayer using GitHub Actions and links to built outputs (there's also Qt5 builds for Linux as a .deb and a snap there).

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