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Installing libsndfile on Windows

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lnfiniteMonkeys edited this page Oct 18, 2019 · 2 revisions

One of the dependencies for TimeLines to work is libsndfile, a C library that deals with sound files (which TimeLines actually uses to store its control signals, not sound!). This has proven tricky to install and link successfully on Windows, so the following steps will hopefully help. Don't worry, you will only have to do this once, and hopefully future versions will bypass this dependency alltogether.

NOTE: The Haskell Platform should be already installed before you try this, as well as this repository should be cloned somewhere on your machine (by default in the ~/timelines directory).

  1. Firstly, open the command prompt and navigate to where you cloned the TimeLines source code (i.e. this repo). Run stack build inside that directory and wait while it downloads and sets up everything. This step will eventually fail with the error Missing (or bad) C library: sndfile, that's normal and we'll fix this error in the following steps.
  2. Navigate to C:\Users\<YourUserName>\AppData\Local\Programs\stack\x86_64-windows\msys2-20180531, replacing your username. If you can't find the AppData folder you might need to enable viewing of hidden files and folders. The numbers at the end of the msys2 directory may differ depending on your installation, don't worry about that.
  3. Right click on MSYS2.exe and click "Run as administrator".
  4. One-by-one run the following lines in the command prompt that just opened, pressing y whenever prompted to continue. To paste you can use Shift + Ins, or just right click inside the window.
pacman-key --init
pacman-key --populate msys2
pacman-key --refresh-keys
pacman -Syu

(When prompted, restart MSYS2 by closing the window and running it in administrator mode again)

pacman -Su

pacman -S mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-libsndfile

Now close the window, go back to the command prompt inside the timelines directory and run stack build again. This should now successfully complete.

Note: You might need to grant some permissions on the MSYS2 directory if you're getting permission-related errors.

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