Ardour

Building Ardour on Windows with MSVC

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Do you really need to do this? We provide ready-to-run packages of Ardour. Unless you are a developer with experience compiling and building applications from source, this document is not for you. Please go back to the download page.

We do not provide support for building from source. We do not make regular efforts to keep this page up to date. Please do not ask for help with this process.

Getting Required Libraries and Tools

Ardour uses a lot of software libraries to provide functionality needed by the program. Before you can build Ardour, you will need to make sure that your system has all of the current dependencies installed. You can acquire all the needed libraries using xmake, as follows:

  1. Use Powershell for all terminal commands.
  2. Download and run xmake-dev.win64.exe from github. See also xmake.io.
  3. Run xrepo update-repo
  4. Create a Folder for the dependencies: mkdir ~/src/stack
  5. Save ardour-build-dep.lua as ~/src/stack/xmake.lua
  6. Powershell cd ~/src/stack
  7. Build the dependencies:xmake f -c and/or xmake f -c -m debug

The dependency stack won't need updating if transitive dependencies change. Note that currently when building debug dependencies, there is a chance of libjpeg-turbo causing errors. re-running xmake f -c -m debug may help as may using libjpeg instead.

Building Ardour

Get Ardour source-code (note: shallow clones do not work): 

git clone git://git.ardour.org/ardour/ardour.git msvc_ardour

Builds are marshalled by waf, MSVC 2026 (VS 18) or later is required. llvm-nm needs to be in PATH as well. 

$env:PATH = "$env:USERPROFILE\src\stack\release\bin;$env:PATH"
$env:PKG_CONFIG_PATH = "$env:USERPROFILE\src\stack\release\lib\pkgconfig"

python waf configure --prefix=C:\ArdourMSVC --configdir=share --ptformat --dist-target=msvc --cxx17 --optimize --also-include=$env:USERPROFILE\src\stack\release\include --also-libdir=$env:USERPROFILE\src\stack\release\lib

python waf

This information is based on outstanding work by EZ4Stephen who pursued this and provided the recipe on the Ardour forum. Above script may or may not work directly and also require manual tweaks for your system.