These steps were tested with Audacity 2.2.0 alpha July 24th on a clean installation of Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) 64-bit.
They should also work on other flavours of Ubuntu 17.04
If any other version of Audacity is already installed, I would recommend uninstalling it before starting these steps.
When the instructions say to install a named package (for example “build-essentials”), that can either be done with your preferred package manager (such as Synaptic or the Software Centre), or from the command line in a terminal window using the command given in the code block.
Prerequisites:
By default, the source code repositories are not enabled in Ubuntu 17.04. They must be enabled.
- Launch “Software and Updates”
- In the “Ubuntu Software” tab, ensure that the 5 checkboxes are enabled (Not the “cdrom” option in the box at the bottom).
- In the “Updates” tab, ensures that “Important security updates” and “Recommended updates” are selected
- Click the “Close” button
- Reload the software list when prompted
Ensure that the system is fully updated:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
(Although not usually required, some updates require a reboot to take effect, and there is no harm in rebooting at this point.)
Install “build-essential”. (this may already be installed, in which case this command will inform you).
sudo apt-get install build-essential
Dependencies:
The simplest way to satisfy all dependencies for building Audacity is from the command line (in a Terminal window)
sudo apt-get build-dep audacity
(For a minimal number of installed packages, see Note 1 at end of post.)
Download the Audacity source code:
Go to https://github.com/audacity/audacity and click on the green “Clone or download” button, then select “Download Zip”.
When the download is complete, extract the contents of the zip file to a convenient location. It will create a folder called “audacity-master” that contains the full source code tree,
Configure and Build Audacity:
Open a terminal window in the “audacity-master” folder and enter the following commands:
mkdir build
cd build
mkdir "Portable Settings"
Configure:
../configure --with-lib-preference="local system" --with-ffmpeg=system
and build
make
If your computer has multiple cores, building can be made quicker by adding the “-j” (“jobs”) switch followed by the number of cores that your processor has. For example, for a quad core processor:
make -j 4
When the build has completed (assuming no errors) Audacity can be launched with:
./audacity
Building the optional Nyquist Workbench Module:
If you wish to build Nyquist Workbench, it must be done on the same day as Audacity is built.
- Build the module
make modules
- Eable Nyquist Workbench:
- Launch Audacity
- Enable Nyquist Workbench in “Edit->Preferences->modules”
- Restart Audacity.
Nyquist Workbench should now be available in the “Select” menu.
Installing Audacity:
When you are satisfied that Audacity is built and working correctly, install with:
sudo make install
If the optional Nyquist Workbench was built, to install it:
- Copy modules to Audacity installation folder:
sudo cp -r modules/ /usr/local/share/audacity/
- Eable Nyquist Workbench:
- Launch Audacity as you would any other installed application (for example, search the Ubuntu Dash)
- Enable Nyquist Workbench in “Edit->Preferences->modules”
- Restart Audacity.
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Additional information:
Note 1.
The minimum requirements for building Audacity are: libwxgtk3.0-dev zlib1g-dev cmake libasound2-dev libexpat1-dev libgtk2.0-dev
(Installing these dependencies may pull in additional dependencies as required)
For jack support, libjack-dev is also required.
For ffmpeg, libavformat-dev is required
If libavformat-dev and its dependencies are not installed, the configure command should be run as:
../configure --with-lib-preference="local system" --without-ffmpeg
LAME and FFmpeg are optional. LAME provides support for MP3 encoding, and FFmpeg provides support for many additional formats.
If required, they can be installed:
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libmp3lame0