Building from sources (Windows, MacOS, Linux, ArchLinux)

For GitHub users:

  • Audiveris “master” branch is updated only when a new release is published.
  • Instead, Audiveris development happens continuously in “development” branch, so checkout and pull this development branch to get and build the latest version.
  • See workflow details in this dedicated Wiki article.

Table of contents

  1. Dependencies
  2. Download, build and run
  3. Alternative run

Dependencies

  • Git: version control system.

  • Gradle: build tool.

  • Java Development Kit (JDK): version 17 (higher numbers may work, to be confirmed). Audiveris 5.3 runs only on 64-bit architectures.

  • Tesseract OCR: The Tesseract libraries are automatically pulled as Gradle dependencies, but you will need the Tesseract language files for this OCR to work properly.
    Please check OCR languages section.

  • FreeType library: Unix-like platforms (including MacOS) need FreeType in your $PATH to handle those specific PDFs that contain vector graphics.
    Fortunately, every known Unix-like OS distribution already contains a package for FreeType.

Download, build and run

To download the Audiveris project, use the following command in a directory of your choice:

git clone https://github.com/Audiveris/audiveris.git

This will create a sub-directory named “audiveris” in your current directory and populate it with project material (notably source code and build procedure).

Now move to this “audiveris” project directory:

cd audiveris

Once in this audiveris project directory, you can select the branch you want.
By default, you are on masterbranch.
To use the developmentbranch with its latest features, use:

git checkout development

# To make sure you grab even the latest updates:
git pull --all

You can build the software via the command:

# (Linux & Mac, or Cygwin terminal under Windows)
./gradlew build

# (Windows terminal)
gradlew.bat build

You can run the software, as GUI tool, via the command:

# (Linux & Mac, or Cygwin terminal under Windows)
./gradlew run

# (Windows terminal)
gradlew.bat run

Please note that all these commands use gradle wrapper (gradlew) which, behind the scenes, takes care of getting and launching the proper gradle version.

Alternative run

The gradle-based run, as described above, makes sure that all your potential modifications are compiled before the application is launched. This is the preferred approach for a developer.

However, if you don’t modify the code and merely want to launch the (un-modified) application you don’t need to go through gradle for each and every run.

Because, once you have built the software with the gradle build command as stated above, you now have a build/distributions folder in the repository root with tarred/zipped libraries (Audiveris.tar and Audiveris.zip).

Simply extract either one of the archives:

# Either extract the .tar archive
tar -xf build/distributions/Audiveris.tar

# Or extract the .zip archive
unzip build/distributions/Audiveris.zip

Then, you can repeatedly run audiveris from those files:

# Run audiveris (append arguments if so needed):
java -cp "Audiveris/lib/*" Audiveris