How to build Ardour 6 on Ubuntu 20

Build Ardour 6 on Ubuntu 20.04

This is how you build Ardour 6 on Ubuntu 20.

EDIT: This also works for Ardour 7 on Ubuntu 22.10

If you simply want to install it, you can download it and pay as little as 1$ directly on the Ardour website

Step by step instructions

  1. Clone the repo

    git clone https://github.com/ardour/ardour

    and cd into the directory

    cd ardour

    This will fetch the LATEST version of Ardour, which might be unstable.

    You can list all versions (sorted) with: git tag | sort -V and select a specific version with: git checkout 6.9

  2. Install the dependencies

    sudo apt install -y \
libboost-all-dev gcc g++ pkg-config libasound2-dev libgtk2.0-dev \
libsndfile1-dev libcurl4-nss-dev libarchive-dev liblo-dev libtag1-dev \
vamp-plugin-sdk librubberband-dev libfftw3-dev libaubio-dev libxml2-dev \
lv2-dev libserd-dev libsord-dev libsratom-dev liblilv-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev

    sudo apt-get install -y \
libglibmm-2.4-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev libpangomm-1.4-dev libsamplerate0-dev \
libcunit1-dev libcppunit-dev libudev-dev libserd-0-0 libcwiid-dev \
libxwiimote-dev libwebsocketpp-dev libwebsockets-dev \
libsratom-0-0 liblrdf0 liblrdf0-dev libsuil-dev

    I added the libsuil-dev package which will allow LV2 plugins to display their own custom GUI, instead of a generic one.

    Based on an answer of mine from Ask Ubuntu

  3. Build Ardour

    ./waf configure
./waf
./waf install

And you are done!

For more detail see:
http://ardour.org/building_linux.html

Build the Ardour version your package manager supports

If for some reason you want to build the version that your package manager has, which will probably not be the newest version, there is a quick way to install the dependencies for that.

You can check which version your package manager has:

apt-cache policy ardour

In my case that is 5.12:

Candidate: 1:5.12.0-3ubuntu4

By using the apt build-dep command, we can install all the packages required to build the package locally.

build-dep causes apt-get to install/remove packages in an attempt to satisfy the build dependencies for a source package. By default the dependencies are satisfied to build the package natively.

apt build-dep ardour

Then do the same ./waf commands as listed above.

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