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 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 discusses only the main Csound build system, which uses SCons, a Python program that replaces make for cross-platform configuration and building.

All Csound 5 builds require the following:

It is best to obtain current Csound 5 sources from CVS at http://sourceforge.net/projects/csound.

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 scons install or ./install.sh.

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.