The Ardour project just announced version four of the digital audio workstation. Debian carries version 3, so I decided to build version 4 myself. Here is a summary from what I learned.
First of all, the Ardour people have written a building page and a list of dependencies. The do carry a set of patches towards some of the packages. These seems to be more or less small fixes, apart from the libsndfile that has a bug fix for handling BWF files.
In addition to the patches libs, the requirements list a whole range of gtk and corresponding -mm packages as well as boost, and varous codecs and such. I decided not to care too much about versions for these packages. Instead, I just took whatever I could find in Debian. The packages installed are:
- libsndfile1-dev
- libgnomecanvas2-dev
- libsigc++-2.0-dev
- libcairo2-dev
- liblrdf0-dev
- libfreetype6-dev
- libboost1.55-all-dev
- libfftw3-dev
- libglibmm-2.4-dev
- libcairomm-1.0-dev
- libpangomm-1.4-dev
- libatkmm-1.6-dev
- libart2.0-cil-dev
- libgnomecanvasmm-2.6-dev
- liblo-dev
- libraptor2-dev
- librasqal3-dev
- libogg-dev
- libflac-dev
- libvorbis-dev
- libsamplerate0-dev
- libaudio-dev
- liblv2dynparam1-dev
- libserd-dev
- libsord-dev
- libsratom-dev
- liblilv-dev
- libsuil-dev
- librubberband-dev
- vamp-plugin-sdk
- libaubio-dev
- libjack-dev
- liblilv-dev
Then it is just a matter of configuring using waf.
./waf configure --with-backend=alsa --prefix=/wherever/you/want/it
make
./waf install
My plan is to use ALSA (i.e. not JACK) and installing libjack-dev meant that Skype got kicked out, so the system needed some love to restore the order.
apt-get autoremove
apt-get remove libjack-dev
apt-get remove libjack0
dpkg --install skype-debian_4.3.0.37-1_i386.deb
apt-get install -f
Despite this little hack, Ardour seems to work nicely and record and play back. I still need to test out some more features to see if everything is in place, but it looks hopeful.
Update! As pointed out in the comments, Debian not only carries a really old version but also version 3.