Building Ardour on Windows with MSYS2

Installation & Configuration Windows
#1

Hi folks, I’ve put together a blog post on how to build Ardour for windows, on windows using the MSYS2 environment. It is targeted at developers, and I’m interested to get feedback, particularly if I’ve done something that’s going to cause problems I haven’t anticipated etc.

If anyone is game enough, I’d also be keen to know if I’ve made any mistakes. I’ve got a really rubbish internet connection right now, but once my proper connection is here I’ll blow my msys environment away and double-check my instructions again.

Hopefully this makes it a little easier for windows devs to jump in and help out.

Thanks,

Guy.

Where's the entry point of the program, and build scripts?
#2

I have just followed your post and successfully compiled the latest version of Ardour on Windows 10 thanks to it! There may have been some extra steps (I’m about to try it again on a different Windows box and will update with detailed notes), it was really hard, but your blog post took care of most of the trickiest parts. I also compiled the latest version of ZynAddSubFX on Windows 10, and it’s working as a 64-bit VST plugin in Ardour.

Thanks a lot for documenting this, I’m glad I can use my favourite software in Windows (and potentially dev on it).

#3

I put together a recipe for compiling Ardour on Windows 10 with MinGW and MSYS2 that works with the current Ardour: https://github.com/defcronyke/ardour/tree/win64-mingw-msys/mingw

There were lots of differences from your original post, and I worked it into a formula where most of it can be copy-pasted into the MinGW MSYS2 terminal. I’m going to make some scripts soon out of it to make it a mostly automated process.

#4

The github link is dead by the way. Leads to 404. Is there an alternative to how to use MSYS2 to build Ardour?

#5

The official builds of Ardour are cross-compiled on Linux. We do not use Windows at all.

#6

Understood, thanks for the response.

#7

I tried to follow your steps, but I encountered an issue while following your steps. The issue that I have is that while using the terminal, I get the ==> ERROR: PKGBUILD does not exist. message. I still don’t know what I did wrong. Here are the screenshots of the issue:

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As you can see, the instructions say to switch to guypkgs branch, yet that branch does not exist. I don’t know what I did wrong. Can you help me? (I am a Windows user by the way.)

#8

Here are the steps I was doing:

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#9

I think I passed this step, but encountered another error:

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How I did that is that I removed the .{extension} from PKGBUILD (and I copied that file into the MINGW-packages branch). I tried to install packages in both the outside of the branch where the PKGBUILD already was, and it also failed in the branch itself, where I had copied the PKGBUILD into MINGW-packages branch. I still don’t know what I did wrong.

Edit: I still cannot find the guypkgs branch, maybe that branch contains the data to install?

Edit 2: Found the guypkgs in the MINGW-packages\.git\refs\heads, like it was literally in the .git folder, like bruh. Yet, I still get that error again:
error: no targets specified (use -h for help)
==> WARNING: Failed to install built package(s).
Why does it not work??

#10

That blog post is over seven years old. It probably doesn’t work because things have changed since it was written. It doesn’t sound like the instructions were ever complete to begin with as another user created a GitHub page to fill in the missing bits, which is no longer available. As Paul pointed out, this is not the method that Ardour uses to make Windows binaries, so you are entirely on your own trying to figure this out unless another user who has tinkered with this stuff happens to chime in.