MacOS Catalina 10.15.7 AudioUnit Microphone notification callback not invoked

Question

I am building a command line tool using only command line tools (mainly clang) in ObjC++ using AudioUnit v2(C) API. Output to speakers works fine but the input from microphone callback is never invoked. The iTerm or Terminal hosts have access according to Settings. The executable also has an embedded info.plist although I do not think this is relevant.

The precise security model is not clear to me, it looks like a major security hole if it worked (anything run from terminal would have access): my guess is that the process launched by an "App" has permissions which then propagate to any child process. However this view is confused by another case where an executable I generate does network access (as it happens only to localhost because it is a regression test) and in this case the executable is asking for network access, not the terminal.

The source code is actually written in Felix which is translated to C++ and then compiled and linked by clang with the -ObjC option so embedded Objective C is supported. The translator is mature enough to have reasonable confidence in its correctness in this kind of simple application. The AudioUnit configuration for the microphone input is:

   // configure
    var outputElement = 0u32;
    var inputElement = 1u32;

    // establish callback
    status = AudioUnitSetProperty(
      outputAudioUnit, 
      kAudioOutputUnitProperty_SetInputCallback,
      kAudioUnitScope_Global,
      inputElement,
      (&inputCallback).address,
      C_hack::sizeof[AURenderCallbackStruct].uint32
    );
    assert noErr == status;

and the inputElement is enabled and outputElement disabled. A second audio unit is constructed later with similar technology which pumps a sine wave to the speakers and that works fine. The actual callback just prints a diagnostic and exits, but the diagnostic is never seen. Originally, the terminal had no permissions, and we guessed the code was correct but failed due to lack of permission to access the microphone. The executable still has no permission but the terminal does now (if I try to run the executable from file manager a terminal pops up).

No errors are reported at any stage. The callback simply isn't invoked.

Answer 1

To get a callback, you need to

1. enable IO
2. set the audio unit input device

Number 2. trips people up because it's not necessary for output [which sensibly defaults to the default output device], nor is it necessary on iOS, probably because there is no concept of Audio Device there, at least not in the AudioUnit API.

Surprisingly, both these requirements are actually documented! Technote 2091 covers the steps needed to record audio using AudioUnits and code listings 3. and 4. have sample code that enables IO and sets the input device. Listing 4. sets the audio unit input device to whatever the default input device was, but any input device will do.

Since macOS Mojave (10.14), you need an NSMicrophoneUsageDescription string in your Info.plist. Without this, your app is aborted with an exception. With this, the user is shown a prompt requesting permission to access input devices. You can control when this happens using code found here. For a command line tool, you can embed an Info.plist file during the link stage.

On Catalina you also seem to need to opt into audio-input enabled sandboxing or the hardened runtime (or both!). Without one of these your callback is called, but with silence! Both of these runtime environments are enabled using "entitlements" which are metadata that is embedded in your app via codesigning, so you will need some form of codesigning. I don't think this necessarily means you will need a certificate from Apple, there is "local/ad-hoc" code signing, which seems to embed entitlements without a certificate, although I'm not sure how distributable the resulting binaries will be.