- python3 >= 3.5
- conan >= 1.32.0
- cmake >= 3.16
- A working C++ 14 compiler
The best way to install Conan is pip
.
To install Conan on Windows:
$ pip install conan
To install Conan on macOS and Linux:
$ sudo pip3 install conan
Alternatively, on macOS, Conan is available from brew
.
On Windows, please use the prebuilt binaries.
On macOS, the easiest way to install CMake is brew install cmake
.
On Linux, cmake
is usually available from the system package manager.
We build Audacity using Microsoft Visual Studio 2019. In order to build Audacity Desktop development with C++ workload is required.
As we require only C++14 - MSVC 2017 should work just well too.
We build Audacity using XCode 12. However, it is likely possible to build it with XCode 7.
We use GCC 9, but any C++14 compliant compiler should work.
On Debian or Ubuntu, you can install everything required using the following commands:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install -y build-essential cmake git python3-pip
$ sudo pip3 install conan
$ sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libasound2-dev libavformat-dev libjack-jackd2-dev uuid-dev
-
Clone Audacity from the Audacity GitHub project.
For example, in the git-bash run:
$ git clone https://github.com/audacity/audacity/
-
Open CMake GUI.
Set the Where is the source code to the location Audicity was cloned.
Set Where to build the binaries to the location you want to place your build in. It is preffered, that this location is not within the directory with the source code.
-
Press Configure. You can choose which version of Visual Studio to use and the platform to build for in the popup. We support x64 and Win32 platforms. The x64 platform is a default option. Press Finish to start the configuration process.
-
After the successful configuration, you will see
Configuring done
in the last line of the log. Press Generate to generate the Visual Studio project. -
After you see "Generating done", press Open Project to open the project in Visual Studio.
-
Select "Build -> Build Solution".
-
You can now run and debug Audacity!
Generally, steps 1-5 are only needed for the first-time configuration. Then, after you've generated the solution - you can open it in Visual Studio next time. In case when the project configuration has changed - the IDE will invoke CMake internally.
Conan Center provides prebuilt binaries only for x64. Configuring the project for Win32 will take much longer, as all the 3d party libraries will be built during the configuration.
-
Clone Audacity from the Audacity GitHub project.
$ git clone https://github.com/audacity/audacity/
-
Configure Audacity using CMake:
$ mkdir build && cd build $ cmake -GXCode -T buildsystem=1 ../audacity
-
Open Audacity XCode project:
$ open Audacity.xcodeproj
and build Audacity using the IDE.
Steps 1 and 2 are only required for the first-time builds.
Alternatively, you can use CLion. If you chose so, open the directory where you have cloned Audacity using CLion and you are good to go.
At the moment, we only support x86_64 builds. It is possible to build using AppleSilicon harware, but mad and id3tag should be disabled:
cmake -GXCode -T buildsystem=1 -Daudacity_use_mad="off" -Daudacity_use_id3tag=off ../audacity
-
Clone Audacity from the Audacity GitHub project.
$ git clone https://github.com/audacity/audacity/
-
Configure Audacity using CMake:
$ mkdir build && cd build $ cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -Daudacity_use_ffmpeg=loaded ../audacity
By default, Debug build will be configured. To change that, pass
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
to CMake. -
Build Audacity:
$ make -j'nproc`
-
Testing the build: Adding a "Portable Settings" folder allows Audacity to ignore the settings of any existing Audacity installation.
$ cd bin/Debug $ mkdir "Portable Settings" $ ./audacity
-
Installing Audacity
$ cd <build directory> $ sudo make install
You can use cmake -LH
to get a list of the options available (or use CMake GUI or ccmake
). The list will include the documentation about each option. For convienience, here is a list of the most notable options.
On Linux, it is possible to build Audacity using (almost) only the libraries provided by the package manager. Please, see the list of the required libraries here.
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" \
-Daudacity_use_ffmpeg=loaded \
-Daudacity_lib_preference=system \
-Daudacity_obey_system_dependencies=On \
../audacity
There are a few cases when the local library build is preferred:
- wxWidgets: While Audacity on Linux uses vanilla version of wxWidgets, we require that version 3.1.3 is used. This version is not available in most of the distributives.
- portaudio-v19: Audacity currently uses some private APIs, so using system portaudio is not yet possible.
- vamp-host-sdk: Development packages are not available in Ubuntu 20.04.
- libnyquist, portmixer: Libraries is not available in Ubuntu 20.04.
- sqlite3, libsmbs: Libraries are very outdated in Ubuntu 20.04.
It is not advised to mix system and local libraries, except for the list above. ZLib
is very common dependency; it is possible to mix system and local libraries in one build. However, we try to mitigate this issue to some extent.
There is a Dockerfile
that can be used as an example of how to build the Audacity using system libraries:
$ docker build -t audacity_linux_env .\linux\build-environment\
$ docker run --rm -v ${pwd}:/audacity/audacity/ -v ${pwd}/../build/linux-system:/audacity/build -it audacity_linux_env
To find system packages, we rely on pkg-config
. There are several packages, that have broken *.pc
or do not use pkg-config
at all. For the docker image - we mitigate this issue by installing the correct pc
files.