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Building Audacity

Prerequisites

  • python3 >= 3.5
  • conan >= 1.32.0
  • cmake >= 3.16
  • A working C++ 14 compiler

Conan

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.

CMake

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.

Windows

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 fine too.

MacOS

We build Audacity using XCode 12. However, it is likely possible to build it with XCode 7.

Linux

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

Building on Windows

  1. Clone Audacity from the Audacity GitHub project.

    For example, in the git-bash run:

    $ git clone https://github.com/audacity/audacity/

  2. Open CMake GUI.

    Set the Where is the source code to the location where Audacity was cloned.

    Set Where to build the binaries to the location you want to place your build in. It is preferred that this location is not within the directory with the source code.

  3. Press Configure. You can choose which version of Visual Studio to use and the platform to build for in the pop-up. We support x64 and Win32 platforms. The x64 platform is a default option. Press Finish to start the configuration process.

  4. After successful configuration, you will see Configuring done in the last line of the log. Press Generate to generate the Visual Studio project.

  5. After you see "Generating done", press Open Project to open the project in Visual Studio.

  6. Select "Build -> Build Solution".

  7. You can now run and debug Audacity!

Generally, steps 1-5 are only needed the first-time you configure. Then, after you've generated the solution, you can open it in Visual Studio next time. If 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 3rd party libraries will be built during the configuration.

macOS

  1. Clone Audacity from the Audacity GitHub project.

    $ git clone https://github.com/audacity/audacity/

  2. Configure Audacity using CMake:

    $ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake -GXcode -T buildsystem=1 ../audacity

  3. Open Audacity XCode project:

    $ open Audacity.xcodeproj

    and build Audacity using the IDE.

Steps 1 and 2 are only required for first-time builds.

Alternatively, you can use CLion. If you chose to do 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 hardware but mad and id3tag should be disabled:

cmake -GXCode -T buildsystem=1 -Daudacity_use_mad="off" -Daudacity_use_id3tag=off ../audacity

Linux & Other OS

  1. Clone Audacity from the Audacity GitHub project.

    $ git clone https://github.com/audacity/audacity/

  2. 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.

  3. Build Audacity:

    $ make -j`nproc`

  4. 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

  5. Installing Audacity

    $ cd <build directory>
$ sudo make install

Advanced

CMake options

You can use cmake -LH to get a list of the options available (or use CMake GUI or ccmake). The list will include documentation about each option. For convenience, here is a list of the most notable options.

Building using system libraries

On Linux it is possible to build Audacity using (almost) only the libraries provided by the package manager. Please, see the list of 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:

  1. 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 distributions.
  2. portaudio-v19: Audacity currently uses some private APIs, so using system portaudio is not yet possible.
  3. vamp-host-sdk: Development packages are not available in Ubuntu 20.04.
  4. libnyquist & portmixer: Libraries are not available in Ubuntu 20.04.
  5. 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 a very common dependency; it is possible to mix system and local libraries in one build. However, we advise against doing so.

There is a Dockerfile that can be used as an example of how to build 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 handle this issue by installing the correct pc files.