I might think to be a candidate for Windows support
Anyway, this end of the year I am back at compiling Ardour on Windows natively, with mingw. I had complete success at compiling, so I made a webpage with all the steps to reproduce.
Now the issue is when the executable is launched. I see some errors that seem to imply some bug in the code. Before submitting bug requests, I thought to see here if somebody has some ideas.
Aside the window that says, “No audio/MIDI backends detected. Ardour cannot run (This is a build/packaging/system error. It should never happen.)”, I notice a few errors if I launch it from a DOS console:
Ardour: [ERROR]: ControlProtocolManager: module “F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\lib\ardour6\surfaces\ardourcp.dll” has no descriptor function.
Ardour: [ERROR]: ‘protocol_descriptor’: The specified procedure could not be found.
Ardour: [ERROR]: ControlProtocolManager: cannot load module “F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\lib\ardour6\surfaces\ardour_contourdesign.dll” (‘F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\lib\ardour6\surfaces\ardour_contourdesign.dll’: The specified module could not be found.)
Ardour: [ERROR]: ControlProtocolManager: cannot load module “F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\lib\ardour6\surfaces\ardour_push2.dll” (‘F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\lib\ardour6\surfaces\ardour_push2.dll’: The specified module could not be found.)
Ardour: [ERROR]: AudioEngine: cannot load module “F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\lib\ardour6\backends\jack_audiobackend.dll” (‘F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\lib\ardour6\backends\jack_audiobackend.dll’: The specified module could not be found.)
Ardour: [ERROR]: AudioEngine: cannot load module “F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\lib\ardour6\backends\portaudio_callback_backend.dll” (‘F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\lib\ardour6\backends\portaudio_callback_backend.dll’: The specified module could not be found.)
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading default ui configuration file F:\a\usr\src\ardour6\share\ardour6\default_ui_config
Now, the no descriptor error seems to be a bug in the code. There was a similar issue with ladspa (https://github.com/sadko4u/lsp-plugins/issues/47).
After this, Ardour cannot read the following dlls, despite they are exactly there in the specified path. Thus, I guess that the first error impairs Ardour’s ability to see the following dlls, and then we have a catastrophic fault.
The backends are in the right path too, so they are also not seen.
I hope I can be useful, it was quite an effort to get Ardour compiled right. The native mingw port has the most updated packages and libraries, and it would be really nice to have a cutting edge Ardour.