Mixxx Wiki

(Currently the official way to build Mixxx on Windows, frequently referred to as MSVC in discussions. (Microsoft Visual C++))

1. Download & install prerequisites
   • Microsoft Visual C++ Express (Direct link to 2010)
   • Microsoft Windows 7 SDK
   • Qt library for Windows (MSVC2010)
   • Python 2.x
   • SCONS
   • A Bazaar client like Bazaar w/ TortoiseBZR (TortoiseBZR info)
2. Prepare build environment
   • Add to or create the following system environment variables (HowTo,) adjusting the paths to match where you actually installed the above

     QTDIR = C:\qt-windows-4.8.4\
     PATH = C:\qt-windows-4.8.4\bin;C:\Python26;C:\Python26\Scripts

   • If you're using Qt 4.8 or above, you might need to copy all of the Qt4 DLL files from C:\qt\bin to C:\qt\lib since that's where our build script looks for them. (We should fix that.)
3. Get the Mixxx source code
   • Checkout the mixxx repository: with TortoiseBZR, right-click in the folder you want to checkout to, choose Bazaar Checkout/Branch… and enter the following source:

     lp:mixxx

4. Get our pre-compiled dependencies
   • Checkout the dependencies repository (and have it placed beside your “mixxx” directory) from:

      lp:~mixxxdevelopers/mixxx/winlib-msvc10-x86-static

5. Build Mixxx:
   1. Start the Windows SDK command prompt (E.g. Start Menu\Microsoft Windows SDK v.7.0\CMD Shell) and change into the “mixxx” subdirectory of the checkout directory. (E.g. trunk\mixxx)
   2. Type

      setenv /xp /x86 /release

      and hit Enter.

   3. Type

      scons toolchain=msvs winlib=<path to winlib-msvc10-x86-static directory> sqlitedll=0 staticlibs=1 asmlib=0

      and press Enter. (You may need to use scons.bat instead of just scons.)

      • In case scons can't find the dependencies try to load the visual studio enviroment variabels http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/1700bbwd.aspx
      • Add msvcdebug=1 to build the debug version (with console output window.)
      • Add force32=1 if you're on a 64-bit platform with 64-bit Python installed, otherwise it will try to build the x64 version of Mixxx. (win32=1 in older branches.)
      • If you would like to build with MP4/M4A/AAC file support:
        • If you're on Vista and above, add mediafoundation=1. (Vista users must have installed KB2117917.)
        • If you're on XP and below, first build FAAD2 and mp4v2 as detailed here then add faad=1 to the scons command.
6. Run it: When Mixxx is done compiling, run mixxx.exe in the “mixxx/dist32/” directory.
7. (Optional) If you'd like to generate a MSVC project for use with Visual Studio, add the parameter msvc in the command such as

   scons toolchain=msvs winlib=<path to mixxx-win32lib-msvc90-release directory> msvc

   then open the newly generated “mixxx.vcproj” file with Visual Studio.

(You may need to be running an x64/ia64 version of Windows, such as XP Professional x64, Vista x64, Server 2003 x64 or 2008 x64, etc.)

1. Download & install prerequisites
   • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 C++ Express (Download
   • Microsoft Windows 7 SDK You only need to install the following:
     • Vista Headers & x64 libraries
     • x64 C++ compiler
     • Debugging tools (optional, but recommended for troubleshooting)
     • Win32 Development Tools (I don't think you need this, but I'm not sure. I installed it just incase.)
   • Qt source for Windows
   • Python…get the AMD64 version if you want scons to auto-detect the fact that you're on a 64-bit platform (requires 64-bit OS,) otherwise you'll have to manually specify which version you want to build
   • SCONS…get the source if using the 64-bit Python and follow the piece-of-cake instructions in the README
   • A Bazaar client like Bazaar w/ TortoiseBZR. Get the standalone version (unless you are a Python whiz since the 32-bit installer can't see the 64-bit Python installation.)
2. Prepare build environment
   1. Add to or create the following system environment variables (HowTo,) adjusting the paths to match where you actually installed/unpacked the above:

      QTDIR = C:\qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.1
      PATH = C:\qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.1\bin;C:\Python26;C:\Python26\Scripts

   2. Follow the instructions on this page to configure VS C++ Express to use the x64 compiler, includes, and libs
3. Build Qt. Click here for details.
4. Get the Mixxx source code
   • Checkout the mixxx repository: with TortoiseBZR, right-click in the folder you want to checkout to, choose Bazaar Checkout/Branch… and enter the following source: lp:mixxx
5. Get our precompiled dependencies
   • Checkout the dependencies repository with TortoiseBZR, using the following location: lp:~mixxxdevelopers/mixxx/mixxx-win64lib-msvc90-release
6. Build Mixxx
   1. Start the Microsoft Windows SDK 7 command prompt (E.g. Start Menu\Microsoft Windows SDK v.7.0\CMD Shell) and change into the “mixxx” subdirectory of the checkout directory. (E.g. trunk\mixxx)
   2. Type setenv /xp /x64 /release (or /ia64) and hit Enter.
   3. Type scons toolchain=msvs winlib=path_to_mixxx-win64lib-msvc90-release_directory (you may need to use scons.bat instead of just scons.)
      • Add msvcdebug=1 to build the debug version.
      • Add win64=1 if you installed the 32-bit version of Python to force a 64-bit Mixxx build (otherwise it will think you're on a 32-bit platform and build that version.)
      • If you get an error saying that it couldn't find PortAudio, do the following:
        1. Edit C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\scons-1.2.0\SCons\Tool\msvc.py
        2. Comment out the def get_msvc_paths function (starts around line 536)
        3. replace it with the following:

                   def get_msvc_paths(env, version=None, use_mfc_dirs=0):
           	"""Return a 3-tuple of (INCLUDE, LIB, PATH) as the values
           	of those three environment variables that should be set
           	in order to execute the MSVC tools properly."""
           	exe_path = os.environ['PATH']
           	lib_path = os.environ['LIB']
           	include_path = os.environ['INCLUDE']
           
           	return (include_path, lib_path, exe_path)

        4. Re-run scons and it should work.
   • Once the build is finished, you will find everything needed to run Mixxx in the “dist” subdirectory of the checkout directory. Just double-click mixxx.exe and you're off.

1. Start the SDK command prompt as above and change into the “mixxx” subdirectory of the checkout directory. (E.g. trunk\mixxx)
2. Type scons msvc (you may need to use scons.bat instead of just scons.) This will generate a Visual Studio project file called mixxx.vcproj.
   • If you get an error saying that it couldn't find PortAudio, see above
3. Run the Visual C++ GUI from this command line to have it use the 64-bit compile tools (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VCExpress.exe)
4. Open the mixxx\trunk\mixxx\src\mixxx.vcproj file.
5. Follow the instructions on this page again to modify the default settings in the project to get it to build for x64.
6. Open the Menu→Projects→Mixxx Properties… Dialog Go to the C/C++ → Preprocessor/Definitions Tab and add _DEBUG to the preprocessor definitions. This lets you backtrace (debug) Mixxx.
7. Press F7 to build the project

• If you get errors like

  src\engine\ratecontrol.cpp(267) : error C3861: 'isnan': identifier not found

  then you need to edit that source file and add the following at the top under the #includes:

  #ifdef _MSC_VER
  #include <float.h>  // for _isnan() on VC++
  #define isnan(x) _isnan(x)  // VC++ uses _isnan() instead of isnan()
  //#else
  //#include <math.h>  // for isnan() everywhere else
  #endif

The following is an alternate, currently experimental way to build Mixxx from trunk using the Qt Creator IDE. It differs from the normal way of building in that it uses qmake and minGW/GCC, but does not depend on Python, SCons, or Microsoft Visual Studio. (Note that these instructions are not regularly updated.)

1. Download & install the Qt SDK Bundle which includes Qt Creator: http://qt.nokia.com/downloads/ ~200MB download. Requires ~2GB free space on your temp drive (change in user environment variables) for temporary unpacking, and ~2GB free on the target drive.
2. Download & install an SVN or Bazaar Client (i.e. TortoiseSVN -OR- SilkSVN's Windows svn build which can be used with Qt Creator's SVN plugin)
3. SVN checkout or BZR branch/checkout mixxx and mixxx-winlib as in the above instructions.
4. Open mixxx.pro inside Qt Creator which lives in the mixxx directory you made in the previous step.
5. Click on the Projects side button → Run Settings tab → type:

   --resourcePath ../res

   in the Arguments Box

6. Hit the green run (>) button

You can track your progress approximately by your compiler warnings count, a full uninterrupted build will produce ~8000 warnings. (If the build fails only warnings after where it stopped will be shown on the next compile run)

To create a Windows installer package from a debug build (which is default):

• Build and Run Mixxx from the above instructions so you have something to package
• Install NSIS
• open a cmd window and go to your Mixxx directory (this is where your mixxx.pro file is found)
• C:/Qt/QtCreator/mingw/bin/mingw32-make -f Makefile.Debug nsis
• If everything works, you'll get an installable file with a name like mixxx-SVNREV-YYYYMMDD_HHMM-win.exe (where REV is the SVN revision, YYYYMMDD - is year,month,day and HHMM is hour and minute at packaging time)

• Implement a safe NSIS uninstaller, currently the uninstall calls RMDir /r /REBOOTOK $INSTDIR as per the NSIS Help Manual example, this is problematic if users do something silly like put their music in there or install Mixxx into My Documents –> very bad things would happen on an uninstall.
• Fix the build script patch for PortAudio to enable ASIO when compiling with MinGW/qmake → see portaudio TODO (bottom of this page)
• Update INCLUDEPATH to use the new libsndfile.h header
• Recompile libsndfile with flac, ogg, & vorbis support
• Figure out why application icon does not get linked.
• You need to change ”script/ui_scriptstudio.h” to ”ui_scriptstudio.h” on scriptstudio.h line #5. - Why can't we use an #ifdef to take care of this? And why are we compiling with scriptstudio on anyway? -S If you enable normal scripting, you get script studio, proper solution is to get all of the generated crap out of the src folder… but ifdef for MINGW may do for a quick workaround. -G - using QMAKE ifdef to work around this now… yuck, but works. -G
• Package this MSVC-free version for distribution –> http://mixxx.org/packages/windows/(Broken Link) ← installable package people can play with -G
• Until the MSVC-free libraries are 100%, some users may need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Package from the table on this page (depending on the CPU architecture for which Mixxx was compiled.)

My build setup is to keep my mixxx and mixxx-winlib directories inside “My Documents”. Unfortunately as I discovered, minGW's gdb can does not initialize properly when the target application executable has spaces in it's file paths. (gdb C:\mixxx\bin\mixxx.exe = okay, gdb “C:\Program Files\mixxx\bin\mixx.exe” = error 193)… Fortunately, as Sean (Pegasus_RPG) pointed out, Windows file paths can be mangled to 8.3 (you can see them by doing dir /x)

Here is the batch file I use to run gdb Mixxx from C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\My Documents\mixxx\bin (if your USERNAME variable is not 8.3 remember find mangled equivalent by doing dir /x C:\Documents and Settings\).

@echo off
REM gdb can not be run from a path that contains a space... otherwise you get (error 193)
cd "C:\DOCUME~1\%USERNAME%\MYDOCU~1\mixxx"
gdb -silent --eval-command=run --args bin\mixxx --resourcePath res

Once Mixxx is running in gdb, and you crash it… Jump to step #3 of Creating Backtraces and you'll be able to find what line caused it or post the backtrace for dev team to look at.

To cut down on the 2GB that Qt Creator install takes, You may want to delete or zip-n-delete:

• C:\Qt\QtCreator\qt\examples (~600MB → zip to ~120MB)
• C:\Qt\QtCreator\qt\bin\QtWebKitd4.dll (~230MB, Mixxx doesn't use WebKit yet → zip to ~30MB)
• C:\Qt\QtCreator\qt\lib\QtWebKitd4.dll (~230MB 2nd copy)

Please fill these in, I don't know the answers! -S

To have Qt Creator tell the compiler to optimize for the processor you're on, do:

1. ?

To tell it to optimize for a particular processor, do:

• For x86 (the default,) do nothing
• For AMD64,
• For IA64,
• For Intel ATOM,

1. get Msys (MSYS-1.0.10.exe), install and configuring mingw (C:/Qt/QtCreator/mingw)
2. download PortAudio snapshot from http://www.portaudio.com/archives/pa_snapshot.tgz to C:\msys\1.0\home\%USERNAME%
3. download http://trent.gamblin.ca/dx/dx9mgw.zip to C:\msys\1.0\home\%USERNAME%\dx9mgw
4. Open an MSys window
5. tar -zxvf pa_snapshot.tgz && cd portaudio
6. patch portaudio with the PA-Snapshot-20090222-mingw-DirectSound.patch patch
7. ./configure –with-winapi=directx –with-dxdir=../dx9mgw
8. copy the contents of portaudio\lib\.libs to mixxx-winlibs\portaudio-snapshot\minGW-bin
9. copy the contents of portaudio\include to mixxx-winlibs\portaudio-snapshot\include

\--- C:/msys/1.0/home/Administrator/portaudio-snapshot-clean/src/hostapi/dsound/pa_win_ds.c	Wed Jan 21 07:07:32 2009
+++ C:/msys/1.0/home/Administrator/portaudio/src/hostapi/dsound/pa_win_ds.c	Sat Feb 21 23:36:13 2009
@@ -95,8 +95,9 @@
 #include "pa_win_ds.h"
 #include "pa_win_ds_dynlink.h"
 #include "pa_win_waveformat.h"
+#ifdef PAWIN_USE_WDMKS_DEVICE_INFO
 #include "pa_win_wdmks_utils.h"
-
+#endif
 
 #if (defined(WIN32) && (defined(_MSC_VER) && (_MSC_VER >= 1200))) /* MSC version 6 and above */
 #pragma comment( lib, "dsound.lib" )
--- C:/msys/1.0/home/Administrator/portaudio-snapshot-clean/configure	Thu Mar 06 12:14:06 2008
+++ C:/msys/1.0/home/Administrator/portaudio/configure	Sat Feb 21 23:51:24 2009
@@ -21410,10 +21410,10 @@
             PADLL="portaudio.dll"
             THREAD_CFLAGS="-mthreads"
             SHARED_FLAGS="-shared"
-            DLL_LIBS="${DLL_LIBS} -lwinmm -lm -L./dx7sdk/lib -ldsound -lole32"
+            DLL_LIBS="${DLL_LIBS} -lwinmm -lm -L$DXDIR/lib -ldsound -lole32"
             #VC98="\"/c/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/VC98/Include\""
             #CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I$VC98 -DPA_NO_WMME -DPA_NO_ASIO"
-            CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I\$(top_srcdir)/include -I$DXDIR/include -DPA_NO_WMME -DPA_NO_ASIO" -DPA_NO_WDMKS
+            CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I\$(top_srcdir)/include -I$DXDIR/include -DPA_NO_WMME -DPA_NO_ASIO -DPA_NO_WDMKS"
         elif [ $with_winapi = "asio" ] ; then
             if [ $with_asiodir ] ; then
               ASIODIR="$with_asiodir"

• download asiosdk2.2.zip
• wimme, directsound, asio all at once patch (doesn't apply cleanly) – http://www.nabble.com/configure-patch-for-MSYS-users-p20138278.html

Experimental - Doesn't currently build because MinGW64 isn't working correctly.

(You may need to be running an x64/ia64 version of Windows, such as XP Professional x64, Vista x64, Server 2003 x64 or 2008 x64, etc.)

1. Download & install prerequisites
   • MingW64 binary tool chain
     • Might need stuff from here as well
   • Qt Creator for Windows (32-bit but works fine)
   • Qt source for Windows
   • An SVN or BZR client like TortoiseSVN or Bazaar w/ TortoiseBZR
2. Prepare build environment
   1. Add to or create the following system environment variables (HowTo,) adjusting the paths to match where you actually installed/unpacked the above:

      QTDIR = C:\qt\qt-win-opensource-src-4.5.1
      PATH = C:\qt\qt-win-opensource-src-4.5.1\bin;C:\mingw64

3. Tweak the Qt configuration
   1. Edit qt-win-opensource-src-4.5.1\mkspecs\win32-g++\qmake.conf:
      1. Add to QMAKE_CFLAGS:

         -m64 -O3 -march=k8-sse3 -msse4.2 -m3dnow -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -funroll-loops

         (or other optimization options as desired)

      2. (optional) Add -Ox to QMAKE_CFLAGS_RELEASE for extra optimizations
   2. Edit qt-win-opensource-src-4.5.1\qmake\makefile.win32-g++:
      1. add to CFLAGS:

         -m64 -O3 -march=k8-sse3 -msse4.2 -m3dnow -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -funroll-loops

         (or other optimization options as desired)

   3. To avoid building the examples and demos (you don't need them and it saves ALOT of time,) edit qt-win-opensource-src-4.5.1\projects.pro:
      • Remove “examples” and “demos” from QT_BUILD_PARTS toward the top of the file.
4. Build Qt
   1. Start a command prompt (Start→Programs→Accessories→Command Prompt)
   2. Type cd %QTDIR% and hit Enter.
   3. Type configure -platform win32-g++ -no-webkit and for more optimization, add -mmx -3dnow -sse -sse2 & hit Enter.
   4. When it finishes (about 5-10 minutes,) just type mingw32-make and press Enter and you should be good (takes 1~3 hours.)
5. Configure Qt Creator
   1. Open Qt Creator
   2. Go to Tools→Options→Qt4→Qt Versions
   3. Click the plus sign
   4. Enter something meaningful in the Name field like 4.5.1-x64-mingw
   5. Enter C:\qt\qt-win-opensource-src-4.5.1 in the Path field
   6. Enter C:\mingw64 in the MinGw directory field
6. Get the Mixxx source code
   • Checkout the mixxx repository:
     • with TortoiseSVN: right-click in the folder you want to checkout to, choose SVN Checkout… and enter the following source: https://mixxx.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mixxx/trunk
     • with TortoiseBZR: right-click in the folder you want to checkout to, choose Bazaar Checkout/Branch… and enter the following source: lp:mixxx
7. Build Mixxx
   1. Open mixxx-x64-mingw.pro (found in the mixxx directory you made in the previous step) in Qt Creator
   2. Click on the Projects side button → Run Settings tab → type:

      --resourcePath ../res

      in the Arguments Box

   3. Hit the green run (>) button