Compile Ardour from source on Linux Mint 20

Nicola Landro
3 min readSep 15, 2020

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Ardour is the best audio recording system that you can install in yuor linux os. To have the binary file you should buy it (and also if you compile it you can donate something is a great thing to do). But compile it by yourself is free.
Compile Ardour 6.3 using this guide is not enought.There I install all requirements you need to compile Ardour on Linux Mint 20.

Ardour

Requirements

I install and found out the requirements in the way I show in this chapter.

I install jackd and qjackctl with synaptic

sudo apt install libjack-dev

Configurte the user like in jack documentation. Edit the file /etc/security/limits.d/audio.conf

$ sudo nano /etc/security/limits.d/audio.conf
@audio - rtprio 95
@audio - memlock unlimited

Add audio group at your user and reload the session:

sudo groupadd audio
sudo usermod -a -G audio yourUserID
# log out and back

Install python2 like following:

sudo apt install python

Install version of boost≥1.56:

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

Alsa dev lib:

sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev

Other requirements:

sudo apt install libglibmm-2.4-dev
sudo apt install libsndfile1-dev
sudo apt install libcurl4-nss-dev
sudo apt install libarchive-dev
sudo apt install liblo-dev
sudo apt-get install libtag1-dev
sudo apt-get install vamp-plugin-sdk
sudo apt install librubberband-dev
sudo apt install libfftw3-dev

Install aubio:

git clone https://git.aubio.org/aubio/aubio
cd aubio
make
sudo ./waf install

Other requirements:

sudo apt install libxml2-dev
sudo apt install liblrdf0-dev
sudo apt install libsamplerate0-dev
sudo apt-get install lv2-dev
sudo apt-get install libserd-dev
sudo apt-get install libsord-dev
sudo apt-get install libsratom-dev
sudo apt-get install liblilv-dev
sudo apt-get install libgtkmm-2.4-dev

Other non foundamental requirements:

sudo apt install libsoundtouch-dev
sudo apt install libsuil-dev
sudo apt install libcppunit-dev
sudo apt install libusb-1.0-0-dev
sudo apt install libwebsockets-dev

Clone and select verison

git clone https://github.com/Ardour/ardour.git
cd ardour
git checkout 6.3

Build

cd ardour
./waf configure
./waf

Run

cd ardour
cd gtk2_ardour
./ardev

Install

If you want you can install into your desktop environment, but I think this is not interesting (I do not try to run it), you can run:

./waf install

Uninstall

To revert the installation so to uninstall ardour you can exec:

./waf uninstall
./waf clean

(I do not try to run it).

How to use alsa midi to ardour

Install a2jmidi

sudo apt install a2jmidid

Maybe you should repeat this:

sudo usermod -a -G audio yourUserID
# log out and back

Run the bridge:

a2jmidi_bridge

Connect it into alsa tab of qjackctl.

(Also if I am into audio group I have the classical error for jack1, I solve it by an uncommon way):

sudo apt install  libjack-jackd2-dev
sudo apt install libjack-dev
# reboot

Interesting plugin

x42 AVL Drumkits download it and go into folder

./install-lv2.sh
cp avldrums.lv2 ~/.lv2/

Conclusion

Now you can compile the Ardour from source conde so you can record beautiful things and… contribute!

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Nicola Landro

Linux user and Open Source fun. Deep learning PhD. , Full stack web developer, Mobile developer, cloud engineer and Musitian.