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Supported Platforms

• FluidSynth is developed on Linux and thus Linux usually has the most up to date support.
• It is also regularly tested on Mac OSX. For instructions on how to install fluidsynth on this platform, see below.
• FluidSynth can also run on Windows, and building is supported with either MinGW or MSVC.
• FluidSynth may be run on FreeBSD and its derivatives.
• We have had successful reports on FluidSynth running on Solaris and OS/2, but this is not officially supported. It's likely that it will also work on other platforms (most noteably Unix like operating systems).

Requirements

Starting with FluidSynth 1.1.0 the glib library is required.

Building FluidSynth requires your normal list of applications one would find on a system for building software (on Unix this includes gcc, autoconf, automake, etc). Most other externally used software is optional.

Optional

• libsndfile - For rendering MIDI to audio files of different formats.
• JACK - Jack Audio Connection Kit, inter-application audio routing found on Linux and Mac OS X
• ALSA - Modern audio system found on Linux. FluidSynth supports audio output and the ALSA MIDI sequencer
• OSS - Open Sound System (the older Unix sound system)
• PortAudio - Free, cross-platform, audio I/O library
• PulseAudio - Linux sound server
• CoreAudio - Audio system found on Mac OS X
• DirectSound - Sound drivers found on Windows sytems
• MidiShare - Cross platform MIDI environment
• LASH - LASH Audio Session Handler, session management support for ALSA and Jack applications
• LADSPA - Audio plugin architecture (FluidSynth can use LADSPA plugins)
• Readline - For improved command line editing features in the built in shell

Distributions

Many operating systems already provide a package for FluidSynth. See the graphic to right for the currently available packages for various Linux distributions, MacOS Ports and BSD derivatives.

• Gentoo

  emerge fluidsynth

• Ubuntu or Debian

  sudo apt-get install fluidsynth

• Arch Linux

  pacman -S fluidsynth

• OpenSUSE

  sudo zypper install fluidsynth

• Mac OS X

  • With Fink:

    fink install fluidsynth

  • With Homebrew:

    brew install fluidsynth

  • With MacPorts:

    sudo port install fluidsynth

Please contribute to this section if you know how to install FluidSynth packages for a distribution not yet listed.

Source Archives

FluidSynth is also relatively easy to be built from a source archive. Please see BuildingWithCMake for more detailed instructions of how to build FluidSynth from source.

The FluidSynth releases page contains released source archives of FluidSynth.

Unpack the source using a command line shell:

$ tar -xvzf Downloads/fluidsynth-x.y.z.tar.gz

Git

The latest development version of FluidSynth can be found at our git repository git://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth and can be browsed. Unless you are a developer, you should always prefer officially released versions of FluidSynth. Development version are highly unstable and not recommend for production use.

Example check out of FluidSynth trunk using the command line Git client:

git clone git://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth