Building Audacity(R) for Microsoft Windows(R) Copyright (c) 1999-2015 Audacity Team Authors: Asger Ottar Alstrup Lynn Allan Vince Busam Dave Fancella Vaughan Johnson Steve Jolly Leland Lucius Markus Meyer Shane Mueller Martyn Shaw ======================================================================== This document is for Audacity version 2.1.0. If the advice here is inaccurate or incomplete, email audacity-devel@lists.sourceforge.net. ======================================================================== Audacity releases for Windows are currently built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 C++. Most of us use the Express edition, which is free. Note that Audacity uses VC++'s multithreaded DLL runtime libraries. If you have MSVC installed, these are in your PATH, but users to whom you distribute your builds may not have them, so you may have to distribute them, as described for the wxWidgets DLLs, below. For instructions on compiling Audacity under the Cygwin UNIX Emulation Layer, see the "Compiling Audacity under Cygwin" section below. This is not maintained (for a very long time!). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MSVC++ STEP 1: Download and Install wxWidgets ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To simplify the implementation of a near-identical user interface across platforms, Audacity uses wxWidgets, a GUI framework. Audacity 2.1.0 requires wxWidgets 2.8.12. To be able to build Audacity for Windows, download and install wxWidgets from http://www.wxwidgets.org/. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MSVC++ STEP 2: Build wxWidgets ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2.1. Open "C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12\build\msw\wx_dll.dsw" with Microsoft Visual Studio. Make sure to use wx_dll.dsw, not wx.dsw, because wx.dsw does not have the correct dependencies for the DLL builds. When you open wx_dll.dsw, Visual Studio will prompt whether to convert. Click "Yes To All". Next time you open a Visual Studio session, you can avoid this prompt by opening "C\wxWidgets-2.8.12\build\msw\wx_dll.sln" instead of wx_dll.dsw. 2.2. If you want to use the wxWidgets accessibility features, we have modified one of the wxWidgets files. Rather than provide a patch, we store the modified file in the Audacity code repository, and you can replace the corresponding wxWidgets file. You will need to download Audacity (next step) to get these. In "audacity\win\wxWidgets_additions" is one .h file. You may want to make a backup of the wxWidgets original of it, in "C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12\include\wx\msw\setup.h", e.g., by renaming it "setup.h.bak" before copying the replacement, in case you also build without these accessibility features. Copy "audacity\win\wxWidgets_additions\setup.h" to "C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12\include\wx\msw\setup.h". Audacity releases are built with these accessibility features. 2.3. Build wxWidgets for all configurations of Audacity that you want. With Visual Studio 2013 C++ and wxWidgets 2.8.12, you will get an error for a missing pbt.h header. You can (apparently safely) comment that out. In audacity-src\win\wxWidgets_additions, we have a copy of the file with this change already made. As above, you may want to save the original by renaming "C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12\src\msw\window.cpp" to "C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12\src\msw\window.cpp.bak". Then copy "audacity-src\win\wxWidgets_additions\window.cpp" to "C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12\src\msw\window.cpp". * Use the "DLL Unicode Release" configuration to use in a "Release" version of Audacity. * Build "DLL Unicode Debug" configuration to use in a "Debug" version of Audacity. See "MSVC++ STEP 6: Build Audacity" for the differences between these versions of Audacity. For Audacity, you need only the following five projects to build (not the whole solution) for each configuration: * adv * base * core * html * net Building only these will give you a faster build, and possibly smaller wxWidgets DLLs. To do this, Ctrl-select those 5 projects in the Solution Explorer. Then right-click and choose Build Selection (or Rebuild Selection). Because of dependencies, this should also build the following projects. But on some computer configurations, they may not on VS2013, so you might have to explicityly build these as well: * wxexpat * wxjpeg * wxpng * wxregex * wxtiff * wxzlib To be certain about this, you can just Ctrl-select them with the others above, and build them all together. If you build the whole solution, ignore the linker errors for wxbase28*_odbc*.* dbgrid. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MSVC++ STEP 3: Download and Install Audacity ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To check out the latest source code from SVN, see the instructions at "http://audacity.sourceforge.net/community/developers". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MSVC++ STEP 4: Set wxWidgets location for Audacity ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Audacity Visual Studio project has been set up to use enviornment variables to locate all externally referenced SDKs. For wxWidgets, it uses the "WXWIN" environment variable. Before you can build Audacity, you must set the variable. This process can vary depending on the version of Windows you're using. The following is based on Windows 7, so you may need to make adjustments. 4.1. Open the "Control Panel" 4.2. Click the "System" app 4.3. Click the "Advanced system settings" link 4.4. On the "Advanced" tab, click the "Environment Variables..." button 4.5. Click "New..." in the "System variables" group 4.6. Set the "Variable name" to "WXWIN" (without the quotes) 4.7. Set the "Variable value" to the full path of where you installed wxWidgets (typically "C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12") 4.8. Click "OK" until you exit the "System Properties" app An alternative way to do it, that's available on all versions of Windows, is to open a cmd.exe window, and type: set WXWIN =C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12 Once you have set the WXWIN environment variable correctly, the Audacity Project file's declarations will do the rest. Note that if you currently have the Audacity Solution open in Visual Studio, you must restart Visual Studio for it to recognize the new environment variables. In some cases, you may need to reboot the computer to ensure the variables are read correctly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MSVC++ STEP 5: Consider and Configure Optional Features ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5.1. Locally installed help is optional, but required for a full Release build. (The "help" folder is included in the installer, but removed from the zip distribution.) The Python library is required, obtainable from http://www.python.org/download/ . Add the location of the top-level directory where you installed Python to your Path environment variable. For instructions on setting environment variables, see the previous section, "MSVC++ STEP 4: Set wxWidgets location for Audacity". Build the "help" project by enabling it in the MS Visual Studio Configuration Manager (Build menu). This will download a copy of the Manual wiki onto your machine and copy it to the correct place for your build. If the local copy needs to be updated, run audacity\scripts\mw2html_audacity\wiki2htm.bat and re-build the "help" project. 5.2. To support languages other than English in your build of Audacity, you must enable and build the optional "locale" project. This is required for a full release. You will need to obtain msgfmt.exe from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/files/msgfmt.zip. Add the location of the directory containing msgfmt.exe to your Path environment variable. Alternatively, put msgfmt.exe somewhere already in the Path, e.g., C:\Windows. 5.3. Some functionality in Audacity is currently turned on in its default configuration, but requires that extra libraries be downloaded separately to use it. To change the libraries enabled in Audacity, edit "win\configwin.h" and comment or uncomment the entries. 5.4. To add support for ASIO: ASIO (from Steinberg) is a sound card interface protocol that is faster than standard WMME. Unlike WMME, not all soundcard drivers support it. Because ASIO is a proprietary, closed standard, we (or any third party) cannot distribute its SDK. That means we cannot distribute builds of Audacity that support ASIO, because Audacity is licensed under the GPL (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/license), which requires we distribute all source code. So, although you can build your own copies of Audacity with ASIO support, for personal use, you cannot distribute them without violating the Audacity license and the ASIO license. If you build ASIO support into Audacity, do not distribute that build. For ASIO support, get the ASIO SDK from Steinberg (http://www.steinberg.net/en/company/developers.html), install at C:\ASIOSDK, then define an environment variable called ASIOSDK_DIR. The value should be the full path to the base directory of the ASIO SDK, e.g., set ASIOSDK_DIR=C:\ASIOSDK2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MSVC++ STEP 6: Build Audacity ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Run Visual C++ and load the Audacity solution, "audacity\win\audacity.sln". Select the configuration that you wish to build: * "Release" for Unicode-based, general use * "Debug" for a Unicode-based, slower, debuggable executable You can select the configuration from the Solution Configurations pull-down menu, or select it from the "Build" menu > "Configuration Manager..." dialog box. Build Audacity by giving the "Build" menu > "Rebuild Solution" command. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MSVC++ STEP 7: Provide Access to the wxWidgets DLLs ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Each Audacity executable needs access to five specific wxWidgets DLLs from those you built in "MSVC++ STEP 2: Build wxWidgets" above. You can copy them to your Windows PATH, or more simply, to the same directory as the executable. If you are building Audacity for public release using the *.iss installer script, you must copy them to the executable directory. The DLLs required are at "C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12\lib\vc_dll": wxbase28*_net_vc_custom.dll wxbase28*_vc_custom.dll wxmsw28*_adv_vc_custom.dll wxmsw28*_core_vc_custom.dll wxmsw28*_html_vc_custom.dll The "*" in the file names above is replaced in the actual files by a suffix specific to its Widgets configuration. You can identify the DLLs needed for each Audacity version as follows: "u" for "Unicode Release" versions "ud" for "Unicode Debug" versions So for instance, a Debug version of Audacity should have: wxbase28ud_net_vc_custom.dll wxbase28ud_vc_custom.dll wxmsw28ud_adv_vc_custom.dll wxmsw28ud_core_vc_custom.dll wxmsw28ud_html_vc_custom.dll in the "audacity\win\Debug" directory. If this procedure doesn't work, check the "Common Compilation Errors" section on http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Developing_On_Windows . If you still need help after that, please ask on the "Compiling Audacity" board at http://forum.audacityteam.org/. However, the first suggestion there is likely to be "try it again with a clean installation of the wxWidgets source and the latest Audacity source from SVN". So if that's not what you attempted, please try that first. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HELP! I get linker errors! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In some cases, Audacity does compile, but during the linking process you get a bunch of error messages like this: LIBCMTD.lib(LIBCMTD.dll) : error LNK2005: _free already defined in MSVCRTD.lib(dbgheap.obj) This is usually caused by conflicting runtime library settings. Audacity is now linked with DLL linkage. In VC9, select the Audacity project. Then Project > Properties > C/C++ > Code Generation > Runtime Library should be "Multi-threaded Debug DLL (/MDd)" for Debug builds, or "Multi-threaded DLL (/MD)" for Release builds. Make sure you set the correct library type for all corresponding build configurations. Also make sure you check all other libraries, like the Ogg Vorbis libraries, if you have them installed. You may want to use the /VERBOSE:LIB linker parameter to get information about which library is causing the conflict. If all else fails, use the following procedure to force Audacity to link to the correct library: Select the Audacity project in Solution Explorer. Then choose Project > Properties. Select the desired configuration (e.g., "Debug" or "Release"). Select the "Linker" folder in the tree on the left, and the "Input" item. In the "Ignore Specific Library" field, enter "msvcrt.lib" if you were attempting to perform a Release build, or "msvcrtd.lib" for a Debug build. On some systems, you will need to ignore "libcmt.lib" or "libcmtd.lib" instead of "msvcrt.lib" or "msvcrtd.lib", depending on the library which actually causes the conflict. Note that if you have configured all libraries correctly, none of the above should actually be necessary. ======================================================================== ------------------------------- Compiling Audacity under Cygwin ------------------------------- Compiling Audacity under Cygwin is considered "experimental" at this time, and you may notice a few problems when you do so. Please be patient, and make sure to submit bug reports to the development team. If you follow these instructions closely, you *should* be able to build Audacity. These instructions will attempt to help you to compile using the experimental additions that appeared sometime around the 1.2 release. They will also attempt to help you to compile Audacity yourself without the aforementioned support. Make sure to read the instructions in their entirety before beginning, because no matter which source tree you wind up using, all of these instructions are likely to assist you. If you have problems building, make sure you've read all of these instructions. At the bottom there is a list of known bugs. If the problem you encounter is on this list, then there is also a workaround. Just remember to be patient, and that I (Dave Fancella) have successfully built Audacity on 3 different Windows installations with 2 different versions of Windows (XP and 2000 Pro). Knowing that it can be done is most of the battle. --------------------------------- Cygwin STEP 1: Installing Cygwin --------------------------------- 1. Install Cygwin (from "http://www.cygwin.com"). If you have plenty of bandwidth available, you should use the net installer. Otherwise, you might be better off ordering a CD. 2. If you already have Cygwin installed, you should fire up the installer again and compare your installed packages to the list of packages needed. 3. Install the following packages: (This is probably not a complete list. If you find that you have to install more than this, make sure to let us know which ones, so they can be added to this list) Autoconf Autoconf-devel (Autoconf 2.53 is required if you need to rebuild 'configure') gettext-devel (for building the translation files. If you don't want to build these, you don't need this package) Automake Automake-devel binutils gcc (only tested version is 3.3.1) gcc-mingw make mingw-runtime zip (required by configure, although gzip is actually used) w32api --------------------------------------- Cygwin STEP 2: Download and install wxWidgets --------------------------------------- 1. Go to http://www.wxwidgets.org/ and download wxWidgets v2.8.12 or greater. Make sure you download the "wxAll" package that contains source code for all ports. The Win32 port will not work for compiling Audacity, since it was compiled and installed to work with MS Visual C++. 2. Untar the archive from the Cygwin command line, using a command like: tar -xzvf (wxwindows). 3. From the top-level of the wxWidgets source tree, type './configure'. ** For some reason, I haven't been able to get Audacity to link to wxWidgets statically under Cygwin. Since there are bigger fish to fry right now, I haven't dealt with it. I would appreciate if someone gets it to work if you let me know what you did. To try this, use './configure --disable-shared' for wxWidgets configuration. When complete, type "make". When that's complete, "make install". If all goes well, you will have wxWidgets installed in your Cygwin installation! --------------------------------- Cygwin STEP 3: Download Audacity --------------------------------- 1. Go to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and download the Audacity source distribution. Cygwin is currently experimental in the 1.2 branch and SVN head, but you must have at least Audacity v1.2.0 sources. 2. From a cygwin prompt, go to the tarball that you downloaded and use a command like 'tar -xzvf (audacity tarball)' to open it. ----------------------------------------- Cygwin STEP 4: Enable Ogg Vorbis Support ----------------------------------------- Under Cygwin, Audacity does not compile out-of-the-box with Ogg Vorbis support. You have a couple of hoops to jump through if you want this. Note, if you don't do this, you will not have any audio codec available to Audacity! Lame is untested at this time and is assumed not to work. If you try it with Lame, tell us! By default, libogg and libvorbis configure with /usr/local as the prefix. For some weird and inexplicable reason (i.e. I haven't figured it out yet) this doesn't work! GCC will not find the libogg headers when you go to compile libvorbis if you install it in the default location. On that token, GCC will not find libvorbis headers either, so make sure you follow these instructions explicitly. 1. First you have to compile libogg. From the audacity source tree root, type 'cd lib-src/libogg'. 2. ./configure --prefix=/usr 3. make 4. make install 5. cd ../libvorbis # yep, now we have to compile vorbis 6. ./configure --prefix=/usr 7. make 8. make install If all goes well, you will have Ogg Vorbis support in your Audacity executable. ------------------------------ Cygwin STEP 5: Build Audacity ------------------------------ This is the tricky part. :) Audacity comes bundled with a number of libraries that it depends on. Usually you will compile with those rather than any system installed libraries. If you would prefer to use a system installed library, you'll have to pass --with-library=/path/to/library to configure. There are two libraries that currently do not compile in cygwin. Those are Nyquist and libid3tag. If you manage to build them, please send a patch (or instructions on how you did it)! If you didn't enable Ogg Vorbis support as described in the previous step, you will have to pass --without-vorbis to configure, as shown. 1. ./configure --without-nyquist --without-id3tag [--without-vorbis] 2. make 3. ./audacity 4. If you have any problems or errors, read the next section. -------------------------------------- Notes on building Audacity with Cygwin -------------------------------------- These notes are provided because Cygwin support is experimental, and if you run into problems, it might help to know what was needed to make it work on my computer. The problems that appear when compiling Audacity under Cygwin are pretty consistent in how they appear. The win32 port is written under the assumption that MSVC++ will be the compiler used, and is the current standard and supported method of building Audacity. Therefore, the problems that appear are mostly related to various symbols defined to make Audacity compile out of the box on MSVC++. Other problems that surface will likely be based on the fact that Cygwin passes itself to configure as a UNIX variant, and there are various other symbols defined for UNIX variants. GNU/Linux is the standard UNIX variant supported by Audacity, so you will have problems similar to what someone using OpenBSD might encounter. The exception is Mac OS X, which is well-supported already. Audacity uses a series of libraries that are either required or optional, and can be set at compile time. The ones that are optional have --without switches for configure, the others do not. So if a bundled library doesn't compile, your best bet is to try disabling the library in your configure command line. If that doesn't work, you'll have to investigate the library to see why it's not compiling. PortAudio is required, and a Makefile is provided with Audacity to build it. PortMixer is not required, but is recommended. This Makefile is also provided with Audacity. Note: to my knowledge, the Makefile for PortAudio provided with Audacity is not present in the PortAudio distribution. The one used with Audacity compiles PortAudio as a static library, and the current Cygwin Makefile in the PortAudio distribution compiles as a dynamic library. Audacity will compile with either one, but if you use the one provided with PortAudio you will have to make sure the PortAudio dll is in Audacity's path. Of course, you shouldn't have any problems, so this is probably more information than you need. :) Libsamplerate is not supported at all with Cygwin, and it is doubtful that it will ever be supported. If make tries to build it, --disable it. Use Libresample instead. Libresample may require tweaking some #define statements in a fashion that is noted below. Expat should compile out of the box. If not, you might be better off trying to install the version of expat that ships with Cygwin. If configure fails to detect a system installed expat, this is probably a bug and should be submitted to the Audacity developers. You can use the system-installed expat by passing --with-expat=system to ./configure. Any other libraries are probably not required, and if they fail to compile you should be able to --disable them with configure. ----------- Configwin.h ----------- Configwin.h is a file that exists in the win directory from the root of Audacity's source tree. You have three options for getting gcc to find this file. You can modify Audacity's Makefile to include -I../win (or whatever a good path is that will point at the directory). You can copy or move the configwin.h file to Audacity's source directory. Preferably, you will modify configure.ac to generate configwin.h in exactly the same fashion and location that it already generates configunix.h. A fourth option is to not use Configwin.h at all, but to modify the appropriate header files to use configunix.h. Since this might be similar to opening a can of worms, I don't recommend this approach. --------------------- Dealing with #defines --------------------- While working with this build system, there were a few files that failed to compile. Whenever make bombs on a file, you need to carefully note the line it made the error on and open the source file in a good syntax highlighting editor, or you can use Wordpad, which is neither good nor syntax highlighting. Find the appropriate line on which the error occurred. Then scroll up. Chances are very good that the line that triggered the error is wrapped in a #ifndef, #if defined, or #ifdef block. The #define symbol is usually __WIN32__. You will be able to get it to compile by making the line read something like this: #if defined(__WIN32__) && !defined(__CYGWIN__) In order for that to work, you will need to make sure that configure sets the __CYGWIN__ symbol to be defined. You may be able to just add it to Audacity's Makefile, however. If you chose to use the existing Configwin.h file and not have it generated by configure, then you should be able to add a #define in it that defines __CYGWIN__. Ultimately, if you find any of these options too difficult or time-consuming, you might consider just deleting the entire block of code that is afflicted. Since that route will likely wind up making the job hundreds of times more difficult than it actually is, it is not recommended. ----------------- Linking Audacity ----------------- The normal Unix flags for linking will not work with Audacity. Well, they will but they won't include everything that needs to be linked. Before discussing what actually needs to be linked, it would be beneficial to discuss the win32api and Cygwin. This discussion is surrounded on top and bottom by **********'s, so if you already know this information you can easily skip it. ************************************************************ Cygwin is capable of compiling Windows programs that do not depend on the Cygwin runtime. It does this by using the Mingw libraries and header files, which are available under the GPL. However, in order to make these libraries available to GCC, which operates thinking that it's running on a Unix system, the libraries must be stored and named in a location that GCC (or more specifically, LD, the linker) will understand. On GNU systems, and likely on proprietary Unix systems as well (although I don't know this as a fact), a library that is to be linked dynamically will have the extension .so. A library that is to be linked statically has the extension .a. Furthermore, in either case the text "lib" is prepended to the library. When you pass a -l switch to GCC, GCC transparently passes this switch to ld, the linker. The text associated with -l will name the library. For example: If you pass -lfoobar, ld will receive it. In order to actually find the library, ld must prepend "lib" and append ".a", and then search in its known library locations. So it will search for a file called "libfoobar.a" in its known library locations. The known library locations vary from system to system. On some GNU/Linux systems, the known library locations are stored in a special file called "ldconfig". Cygwin does not, however. It appears to know by magic where the libraries are stored. You will find them in /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, /usr/share/lib, and ~/.lib. If you look around your Cygwin installation, you'll find a directory /usr/lib/w32api. In this directory is stored all of the Mingw libraries that allow you to link to the win32api. If you've ever worked with MSVC++, you'll probably recognize the names of these libraries. There's kernel32, odbc32, winmm, and the rest. But they're named with ld's peculiar naming convention, libkernel32.a, libodbc32.a, and libwinmm.a respectively in this example. ************************************************************* From the MSVC++ project file, here are the libraries that need to be linked statically for Audacity to successfully build. kernel32.lib user32.lib gdi32.lib winspool.lib comdlg32.lib advapi32.lib shell32.lib ole32.lib oleaut32.lib uuid.lib odbc32.lib odbccp32.lib wsock32.lib winmm.lib You can also obtain this list by modifying the Audacity Makefile to use `wx-config --static --libs` instead of `wx-config --libs` which it already uses. Currently, Audacity will not build with `wx-config --static --libs`. If you get it to work, let us know! ---------- Known Bugs ---------- First of all, expect your resulting build to work differently in little ways than a build made with MSVC++. Here is a list of currently known bugs in Audacity's build and the resulting executable. Any help fixing these bugs would be greatly appreciated. * Zoom does not center around cursor * Audacity does not associate itself with filetypes (It's #if !defined out, the code works in MSVC++) * libsndfile fails to configure on some systems. If this happens, the known workaround is to configure libsndfile manually and then configure audacity again.