Compiling Ardour 8 On Debian 12

Ardour 8.4 is out with exciting new features, including the ability to import AAF and updates for control surfaces. It also boasts a bunch of bug fixes. However, Debian 12 users are stuck with the older version 7.3. Let’s fix that!

SUPPORT ARDOUR DEVELOPMENT

Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that the most straightforward way to obtain the latest version of Ardour and support development simultaneously is to visit their website and purchase precompiled binaries.

INSTALL DEPENDENCIES

1. In order to build Ardour from source, you will need to install all the extra bits to make that possible. Crack open a terminal and hop into superuser mode.

sudo su

2. Now install the necessary dependencies for Ardour using apt. These dependencies are a collection of software libraries and development tools required to compile Ardour.

sudo apt install build-essential git libboost-all-dev gcc g++ pkg-config libasound2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libsndfile1-dev libarchive-dev liblo-dev libtag1-dev vamp-plugin-sdk librubberband-dev libfftw3-dev libaubio-dev libxml2-dev libsamplerate0-dev lv2-dev libserd-dev libsord-dev libsratom-dev liblilv-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libjack-jackd2-dev libogg-dev libcppunit-dev libudev-dev libwebsockets-dev libusb-dev libsuil-dev libdbus-1-dev xjadeo libusb-1.0-0-dev libreadline-dev  libarchive-dev liblo-dev libtag1-dev libvamp-sdk2v5 librubberband-dev libaubio-dev libpangomm-1.4-dev libserd-dev libsord-dev libsratom-dev liblilv-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libsuil-dev libcppunit-dev python3 liblrdf0-dev libraptor2-dev python-is-python3

CLONE THE GIT REPOSITORY

3. Now we’re going to make a copy of the Ardour repository on our local machine using git.

git clone https://github.com/Ardour/ardour.git

CHECKOUT THE LATEST VERSION

4. Change into the newly created Ardour directory and checkout the latest version. If you want to build a bleeding edge version, you can skip the checkout.

cd ardour 

git checkout 8.4

CONFIGURE THE BUILD

5. Tell the build system to compile an optimized release.

./waf configure --cxx11 --optimize

COMPILE ARDOUR

6. This takes about 7 minutes on a 24-core Threadripper, so you got some time to kill. Go make some tea.

./waf -j `nproc`

INSTALL ARDOUR

7. By default, Ardour will install to /usr/local/

./waf install