What wxWidgets version do recent’ish 3.x versions of Audacity require (say 3.4 and up) and in particular, should that use the GTk2 or GTk3 engine?
I’ve been using a 3.4.0 alpha build (3.3.3_748 according to the git tags) that is about as perfect as it probably can get in the looks department to my eyes. I’ve started to upgrade, in steps because I do have a small collection of personal patches so just based on the source tree layout I decided to check out 3.5.1 first (actually 2 commits after the 3.5.1 release). Something has changed in that release, probably in the theming implementation, causing me to get red and green colours in places where this can’t be intended; see the screenshots here: Where is the download link for this classic theme? - #4 by RJVB .
Question is, is this because I should move to the GTk3 wx engine or because of some (indirect) dependency that is too old but not caught by the build process?
I know how to read, and if that file had the answers to my questions I wouldn’t be asking here, would I
There’s not a word on what GTk version to use, in particular, nor if there are recent requirements on graphics-related dependencies (Mesa in particular, and/or whatever libraries are used in the widget theming using bit- or pixmaps).
Side-note: in fact, according to BUILDING.md it should be impossible to use a system PortAudio, and I remember that this was the case at some point. It hasn’t true for a while, except that the version I now have (“09b77314a48da8b0b48dacd91c6850a3f926c42f”, aka 19.8) comes with cmake modules that define a “PortAudio::PortAudio” alias so I have to patch Audacity’s FindPortAudio.cmake because apparently these things are case-sensitive.
Glad I brought this up though, because it pushed me to look at the changes made to the lib-theme* directories since that 3.4.0 alpha build I was using. Two stood out:
When I revert #96aac54a94e1bd4d3cd18c3803e753ed3953ee31 (make colorways[??] themeable) I get rid of the red background and the green highlights, but I gain some sort of khaki background for the top and bottom toolbars, and it’s the text that becomes red, plus some other changes that must be quite obvious :
I then restored this change, and reverted #b78dcf3cb90cc95f2ea50892b88a39647d35b521, reintroducing theme blending. I had high hopes, and for once they were confirmed:
I honestly don’t know why that feature was removed; maybe it could be brought back as an option because apparently Audacity becomes upset by some of the colours I have in my system palette?!
EDIT: I marked this as a solution, but somewhere between #0ffa73b9f44acc339e12a350edadd96590dc4b17 (where it works) and #2677399f41473fd1cd13f607018475741350c0e1 more changes have been made to the source that cause a completely black background in the toolbar panels
EDIT2: one of the reasons why things can go wrong is that the build process executes image-compiler without ensuring that it uses the libraries it depends on from the current build directory rather than from whatever Audacity version is installed.
Well, if you observe that one part of the information is obsolete and know why that is likely to happen… it can’t hurt to ask for verification purposes (but I herewith apologise to any other unexpected long toes).
I also have some doubts that no distribution ships wxWidgets 3.1.3 or newer these days, as suggested, or that Audacity would fail to build or run with a newer version (I’ve been using it with 3.1.4_667 without any issues, for instance).
That means the build instructions are indeed outdated - but apparently not enough that the build or built executable fail. I’m now at Audacity-3.5.1-409-g2677399f41473fd1cd13f607018475741350c0e1 which still works fine with Audacity’s own wxWidgets version built against GTk2.
Tastes differ but I for one vastly prefer GTk2’s lightness and themability allowing for decent integration with my K DE (that’s the QtCurve GTk2 theme engine) and less waste of smaller screen real estate. Too bad if it doesn’t support Wayland
We’ll see if things start to break while I continue upgrading.
Yes, I saw that (in fact I first saw an “aud4” directory and feared you were planning another file format change…)
A few years ago I would have jumped onto that, not so much now with Qt6. I’m very much into “retro-computing” these days (a fancy way of saying I can’t afford to keep my computing hardware up to date). With Qt’s track record that choice also means dropping all hope for building the software on not-so-recent Macs which would still be perfectly usable for audio applications. And there must be a lot of those, especially among people with an interest in audio recording.
