• Build Requirements
• Common Tips for compiling from source
• Building on Linux
• Building with MSYS2 on Windows
• Building with Cygwin on Windows
• Building with MinGW on Windows
• Building with Visual Studio on Windows
• Building on OS X
• Cross-Compilation

CMake is a cross platform build system, that can be used to replace the old auto-tools, providing a nice building environment and advanced features. Some of these features are:

• Out of sources build: CMake allows you to build your software into a directory different to the source tree. You can safely delete the build directory and all its contents once you are done.
• Multiple generators: classic makefiles can be generated for Unix and MinGW, but also Visual Studio, XCode and Eclipse CDT projects among other types.
• Graphic front-ends for configuration and build options.

More information and documentation is available at the CMake project site

CMake is free software. You can get the sources and pre-compiled packages for Linux and other systems.

You need CMake 3.13 or later to build FluidSynth. However we recommend to use CMake 3.15 or later.

A minimal build of fluidsynth has the following requirements:

• A C compiler. GCC is the primary compiler, including the MinGW port for Windows, and the Apple port for Mac OSX. MS Visual C is also supported. Technically, any C90 compliant compiler should work.
• Starting with fluidsynth 2.2.0, a C++98 compliant compiler will be required.
• CMake >= 3.1.0
• make, gmake, nmake, or an IDE as MS VisualStudio Express, Eclipse CDT, Xcode and others.
• pkg-config tool.
• glib and gthread libraries.

Get the FluidSynth sources somewhere.

First, execute CMake from the build directory, providing the source directory location and optionally, the build options. There are several ways.

• From a command line shell:

$ cd fluidsynth-x.y.z/
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..

The last command (cmake ..) can be modified by adding options. Common modifications include e.g.:

• -Denable-portaudio=1 - portaudio is disabled by default, this will enable that functionality
• -DLIB_SUFFIX="" - make sure we don't put anything in /lib64, this is needed on 64 bit Debian/Ubuntu platforms
• -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr - this will effectively overwrite rather than override an existing FluidSynth installation
• -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug - if you want to help out and find bugs, this will make it easier to debug (but much worse performance)
• -Denable-ubsan=1 - even better debugging support by using UBSan and ASan.
• -DCMAKE_MSVC_RUNTIME_LIBRARY=MultiThreaded - if you want to use a statically-linked MSVC runtime library (requires CMake >= 3.15, use this hack if your CMake is too old)

Valid values for boolean (enable-xxxx) options: 1, 0, yes, no, on, off.

• There are also several alternative CMake front-ends, if you don't want to use the command line interface:
  • ncurses based program, for Linux and Unix: ccmake
  • GUI, Qt4 based program, multiplatform: cmake-gui
  • GUI, Windows native program: CMakeSetup.exe

Then, execute the build command. If you used the Makefiles generator (the default in Linux and other Unix systems) then execute make, gmake or mingw32-make. If you generated a project file, e.g. a MSVS solution, use your IDE to build it.

There are many targets available. To see a complete list of them, type:

$ make help

The build process usually hides the compiler command lines. To get a full, verbose build log:

$ make VERBOSE=1

There is a clean target, but not a distclean one. You should use a build directory different to the source tree (as demonstrated in the command line example above). In this case, the distclean target would be equivalent to simply removing the build directory.

After fluidsynth has been built successfully, it is recommended to execute the unit tests:

$ make check

To compile the developer documentation you need Doxygen installed. Use this command from the root build directory:

$ make doxygen

If there is an error message while executing CMake, this probably means that a required package is missing in your system. You should install the missing component and run CMake again.

If there is an error when executing the build process, after running a flawless CMake configuration process, this means that there may be an error in the source code, or in the build system, or something incompatible in 3rd party libraries.

You can provide feedback and ask for help, by sending a report containing your problem(s) to the FluidSynth development mailing list. Make sure to provide the CMake output and the full, verbose build log. http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev

If your distribution already has a packaged FluidSynth, you may simply install it using the package manager, as described here. You can also grab the build dependencies automatically by running a command such as

sudo apt-get build-dep fluidsynth --no-install-recommends

which should work under Debian/Ubuntu. To build from source please follow the common tips.

After (un)installation (with sudo make install or sudo make uninstall) you might need update the dynamic linker cache by running sudo ldconfig or you'll end up with a new executable calling the old library! You are experiencing some error while loading shared libraries: libfluidsynth.so? Update the linker cache as well! No root permission? Set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to include the path where you've installed libfluidsynth.so, like

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

This is probably the easiest and most straightforward method.

• MSYS2
• DirectX SDK for dsound. You probably already have this installed, so just ignore it. If you encounter issues with CMake later on, then you can download it directly from Microsoft.

1. Install MSYS2 in your preferred location and launch it.
2. Run pacman -Syyu. Let it update, close the window when requested
3. Launch MSYS2 again, either from the mingw32 (32 bit) or mingw64 (64 bit) shell. Choose based on your machine architecture.
4. Run pacman -Syyu and update again. This time it should pull more packages.
5. Once done, install all the dependencies needed by FluidSynth by running:

pacman -S make mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake glib2-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-glib2 mingw-w64-x86_64-libsndfile

This is just an example for 64 bit systems. If you are running the 32 bit version, replace x86_64 by i686.

1. Grab FluidSynths latest release tarball, as described here.
2. Unpack the tarball and navigate into the folder containing the extracted files.
3. Create a new folder, we'll call it build.
4. In the MSYS2 shell, navigate into that folder
5. Run cmake on the previous directory, specifying the Makefile type: cmake -G "MSYS Makefiles" ..
6. Run make to start compilation.

Note: Make sure to execute fluidsynth in the MSYS2 shell as well. It wont work form the cmd.exe (out-of-the-box).

This method provides a full UNIX-like environment. You might run into weird issues with compiled code, such as FluidSynth trying to load Linux audio drivers, or not being able to run FluidSynth without the specific Cygwin DLLs!

Install Cygwin following the setup, and selecting at least the following packages (please note that they might already be marked for installation):

• gcc
• cmake
• glib

1. Grab FluidSynths latest release tarball, as described here.
2. Navigate into the cloned repository and create a new folder, we'll call it 'build'.
3. Navigate into that folder and run cmake on the previous directory, specifying the Makefile type cmake -G "MSYS Makefiles" ..
4. You're set. Run make to build.

If you want to use MinGW you need to setup a build environment containing the glib binaries and its dependencies. For simplicity, you can download prebuilt binaries from gtk.org:

64-bit Windows:

• glib-2.26
• glib-dev-2.26
• pkg-config-0.23
• proxy-libintl
• gettext-runtime-0.18

32-bit Windows:

• glib-2.28
• glib-dev-2.28
• pkg-config-0.26
• proxy-libintl
• gettext-runtime-0.18

Unpack all required ZIPs (see above) to the same directory, a name without spaces, for instance C:\freesw. Add C:\freesw\bin to the system PATH by executing set PATH=C:\freesw\bin;%PATH%. To verify: Start button -> Command Prompt

C:\\> pkg-config --list-all
gio-2.0               GIO - glib I/O library
gmodule-2.0           GModule - Dynamic module loader for GLib
glib-2.0              GLib - C Utility Library
gmodule-no-export-2.0 GModule - Dynamic module loader for GLib
gthread-2.0           GThread - Thread support for GLib
gobject-2.0           GObject - GLib Type, Object, Parameter and Signal Library

For instance, this is the layout of the directory with the dependencies installed:

C:\freesw\
├───bin
├───include
│   └───glib-2.0
│       ├───gio
│       ├───glib
│       └───gobject
├───lib
│   └───glib-2.0
│       └───include
├───manifest
├───pkgconfig
├───share
│   ├───aclocal
(...)

When installing CMake, make sure to let the installer add CMake to the system PATH environment variable, and create a desktop shortcut icon.

Obtain dsound.h and copy it to C:\freesw\include. Either install the Microsoft DirectX SDK or alternatively try Google Code Search to locate a copy of the header file. Some users have mentioned that the header contained in Wine might work.

Note: For simplicity you can unzip the dependencies above directly into your MinGW installation directory.

Get MinGW, for convenience you can use the TDM Bundle installer (use at your own risk).

Run CMake, opening the desktop icon shortcut.

• Select "MinGW Makefiles".
• Select the directory containing FluidSynth sources, and another directory for building (e.g. ./build).

Start mingw32-make on the command line to build the project:

>cd
fluidsynth-x.y.z
>cd build
>mingw32-make.exe

pkg-config was not found: Make sure the folder containing the pkg-config.exe is on the PATH env variable or copy the .exe to mingw32\bin folder.

libintl.dll cannot be found (linker calls it intl):

Make sure libintl.dll is in a directory the linker is looking for (e.g.: c:/mingw32/lib/gcc/mingw32/6.3.0). It does not use the PATH variable. Make sure the filename of libintl.dll does not include the version.

This approach requires to use Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 or later versions. In case you are forced to use an older version of Visual Studio, follow the preparations of the MinGW approach and refer to our CI build script for Windows for correct CMake invocation.

You can get Visual Studio Express Community 2017, from Microsoft. Note: the Community 2017 edition supports many languages, but only C/C++ is needed. You don't need special options, just the defaults.

Prepare your build environment with all prerequisites as described in Building with MinGW. Alternatively you can install glib using the vcpkg tool:

vcpkg install glib

Run CMake, opening the desktop icon shortcut.

• Select the appropriate version of Visual Studio you are going to use.
• Select the directory containing FluidSynth sources, and another directory for building.
• Click "Configure"
• Press "Generate"

Go to the build directory, and double click the file FluidSynth.sln, and build the solution.

Note: As of fluidsynth 1.1.10 there also exists a vcpkg package:

vcpkg install fluidsynth

Get all requirements with Homebrew:

brew install fluidsynth pkg-config

Alternatively install libgnugetopt, readline5, libflac8-dev, libsndfile1-dev, glib2-dev, dbus1.3-dev and cmake manually.

Install XCode, "DevSDK.pkg" and "CoreAudioSDK.pkg" packages from your OS X install media.

Run CMake and start the build as described in section Common Tips for compiling from source.

After a successful build you may optionally install the compiled binaries as superuser:

make install

In order to cross compile fluidsynth make sure you know about the basics of cross compilation using cmake.

It is highly recommend to provide cmake with a toolchain file that takes care about basic path handling like where to find the compiler for your target platform. An example toolchain file for compiling for 64 bit Windows using mingw could look like this:

# Cross compile toolchain configuration based on:
# http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_Cross_Compiling

# the name of the target operating system
SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME Windows)

# 64 bit mingw-w64 - ADJUST THIS TO YOUR NEEDS!
SET(TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX "x86_64-w64-mingw32")

# compilers to use for C and C++
FIND_PROGRAM(CMAKE_C_COMPILER NAMES ${TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX}-gcc)
FIND_PROGRAM(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER NAMES ${TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX}-g++)
FIND_PROGRAM(CMAKE_RC_COMPILER NAMES ${TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX}-windres)
FIND_PROGRAM(PKG_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE ${TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX}-pkg-config)

# path to the target environment
SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH /usr/${TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX}/sys-root/mingw)

# search for programs in the build host directories
SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_PROGRAM NEVER)
# for libraries and headers in the target directories
SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_INCLUDE ONLY)
SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_LIBRARY ONLY)

Furthermore fluidsynth's cmake build system heavily relies on using pkg-config. In order to make sure the pkg-config executable of the host system finds the correct libraries for the target platform, set the PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR environment variable to the path that contains the .pc files for all relevant libraries (i.e. glib, gthread and possibly other dependencies you want to build against).

As usual create a build subdir within fluidsynth's source tree. Invoke cmake and provide the toolchain file by specifying the -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE flag. Additionally consider manually disabling any optional build dependencies that you cannot provide for the target platform.

cd fluidsynth/
mkdir build && cd build
export PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/lib/pkgconfig
cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=my-fluid-toolchain.cmake -Denable-libsndfile=0 -Denable-dbus=0 -Denable-pulseaudio=0 -Denable-jack=0 ..

If your environment is setup correctly cmake should find the compiler and the glib libraries for the target platform and exit successfully.