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://sourceforge.net/projects/csound.

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@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/csound login

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

Information about accessing the CVS repository may be found in the SourceForge document Basic Introduction to CVS and SourceForge.net (SF.net) Project CVS Services.

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

The procedure for building Csound 5 is briefly and incompletely outlined here.

The manual is built using make. Scripts are used for a few other tasks. However, 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 alternatively edit and use Makefile-win32, eliminating the dependencies on Python and SCons.)

All Csound 5 SCons builds require the following:

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

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.

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 or scons install.

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 http://nsis.sourceforge.net, and run csound5/installer/windows/csound.nsi.