Ardour 4 on Debian Jessie

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.

7 thoughts on “Ardour 4 on Debian Jessie”

  1. Right now, not much. But I hooked it up to a couple of synthesizers yesterday and did some multi track recordings.

  2. We also provide Ardour 4.0 as package for Neptune which is debian wheezy based.
    So including the Neptune repo also people on Debian Wheezy can get it going.

    When it comes to the alsa backend I am a little bit dissappointed as it basically blocks the alsa device like jackd was blocking it before.

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