Building Csound

Csound has become a complex project and can involve many dependencies. Unless you are a Csound developer or need to develop Csound plugins, you should try to use one of the precompiled distributions from http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/csound. However, building from source is probably the best option on GNU/Linux.

The sources for the latest release of Csound can be found along with the binary packages at www.sourceforge.net/projects/csound. The source packages have either a zip or tar.gz extension.

The latest Csound source code is available through the Concurrent Versions System (CVS)(http://www.cvshome.org). To download Csound sources using CVS, run the following commands:

    cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@csound.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/csound login

    cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@csound.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/csound co -P csound5

The Csound CVS front page is located at: http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=81968. Information about accessing the CVS repository may be found in the SourceForge document http://sourceforge.net/docs/E04/.

If you wish to become a Csound developer, first obtain a SourceForge login, and then apply to John ffitch at the www.sourceforge.net/projects/csound site, or through the Csound Mailing List.

This section focuses on the main Csound build system, which uses SCons, a Python program that replaces make for cross-platform configuration and building.

(Alternatively, for building a minimal version of Csound 5 (API library compiled as DLL, plugin libraries, and command line frontend) on Windows with MinGW/MSYS, you may edit and use Makefile-win32, eliminating the dependencies on Python and SCons.)

All Csound 5 SCons builds require the following:

Optional configurations can include any of the following. In most cases it is best to install the most recent stable versions.

Get both the packages and their sources (or -dev packages).

Execute scons -h to discover the current configuration options.

Modify custom.py as required for your installation (usually required on Windows, may not be required on Linux).

Execute scons with the options you desire. For example:

scons buildOSC=1 buildCsound5GUI=1 buildPythonOpcodes=1 useOSC=1 buildLoris=0

Set the environment variable OPCODEDIR to the directory where plugin libraries are installed; in the case of a double precision build, OPCODEDIR64 should be set instead. The NSIS installer performs this step.

To install on Linux, execute ./install.py.

To create a Windows installer, build Csound for double precision samples and including the Loris, STK, py, vst4cs, and Fluidsynth opcodes, build the manual, install the NSIS installer from nsis.sourceforge.net, and run csound5/installer/windows/csound.nsi.