Introduction

Notes on compiling Audacity 2.1.1 on Debian 8 (Jessie).

The Debian 8 (Jessie) audacity package was built against wxWidgets version 3.0 which is not supported by upstream. If you encounter issues, you may prefer to build from source.

Compiling wxWidgets

Debian 8 ships with wxWidgets 3.0, but Audacity 2.1.1 must be compiled against 2.8.x, ideally, 2.8.12.

Download wxAll version 2.8.12 (wxWidgets-2.8.12.tar.gz) from http://wxwidgets.org/downloads/

Build and install wxWidgets as follows:

    $ ./configure --with-gtk --enable-unicode
    $ make
    $ sudo make install
    $ sudo ldconfig

Compiling FFmpeg

Import or export using FFmpeg requires FFmpeg 1.2 or later (or libav 0.8 or later), but Debian 8 (Jessie) seems to be version 2.8.1, so we need to compile and install an older version locally.

    $ git clone http://source.ffmpeg.org/git/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg
    $ git branch v2.3.6 n2.3.6
    $ git checkout v2.3.6
    $ sudo apt-get install yasm
    $ ./configure
    $ make
    $ sudo make install
    $ sudo ldconfig

Compiling Audacity

Download audacity-minsrc-2.1.1.tar.xz from http://audacityteam.org/download/source

    $ sudo apt-get build-dep audacity
    $ WX_CONFIG=/usr/local/bin/wx-config ./configure --enable-dynamic-loading \
    --with-wx-version=2.8 --without-libresample --without-libsamplerate \
    --with-expat=system --with-lame=system --with-ffmeg=local \
    --with-libflac=system --with-libid3tag=system --with-libmad=system \
    --with-libsndfile=system --with-libsoxr=system --with-libtwolame=system \
    --with-libvamp=system --with-lib-vorbis=system --with-midi=system \
    --with-portaudio=system --with-sbsms=system --with-soundtouch=system \
    --with-lib-preference='local system'
    $ make
    $ ./audacity
    $ sudo make install

If audacity fails to start properly, you may need to delete (or rename) the ~/.audacity-data/ folder if it exists. On first running audacity you may see the following message:

    EQCurves.xml and EQDefaultCurves.xml were not found on your system.
    Please press 'help' to visit the download page.

Download EQDefaultCurves.xml and save it in ~/.audacity-data/.

References