Build and Use PortAudio on Linux (using CMake)

PortAudio - portable audio I/O library

PortAudio is a portable audio I/O library designed for cross-platform support of audio. It uses either a callback mechanism to request audio processing, or blocking read/write calls to buffer data between the native audio subsystem and the client. Audio can be processed in various formats, including 32 bit floating point, and will be converted to the native format internally.

Installing the ALSA Development Kit

The OSS sound API is very old and not well supported. It is recommended that you use the ALSA sound API. The PortAudio configure script will look for the ALSA SDK. You can install the ALSA SDK on Ubuntu using:

sudo apt-get install libasound-dev

You might need to use yum, or some other package manager, instead of apt-get on your machine.

If you do not install ALSA then you might get a message when testing that says you have no audio devices.

You can find out more about ALSA here: http://www.alsa-project.org/

Installing PortAudio

  1. Get the latest stable release of PortAudio from here. At the time of writing this is v19.7.0.
  2. Extract the tarball tar -xvzf pa_stable_v190700_20210406.tgz to your preferred location. I put it in /opt/portaudio/. Alternatively, get the latest development version from GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/PortAudio/portaudio.git
  1. PortAudio can be built and installed with CMake. You should obtain a recent version of CMake from http://www.cmake.org if you do not have one already.
cmake {portaudio path} -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/install_location
make
make install

Alternatively, standard GNU autotools configure/make can be used to build PortAudio in Linux environments.

{portaudio path}/configure --prefix=/install_location
make
make install

On my system running Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, I installed PortAudio in /usr/local/lib/.

Building with PortAudio using CMake

PortAudio defines the following CMake targets:

  • portaudio_static for a static library
  • portaudio for a dynamic library

To use the CMake package finder you need to tell CMake where to find PortAudio.

list(APPEND CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH /usr/local/lib/portaudio/)

then you may need to include some of the platform independent code headers if you wish to use them.

target_include_directories(portaudio_test PRIVATE /opt/portaudio/src/common/)

A complete example CMakeLists.txt is:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)

project(portaudio_test)

# Set the build directory
set(CMAKE_BINARY_DIR ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/bin)
set(EXECUTABLE_OUTPUT_PATH ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR})
set(LIBRARY_OUTPUT_PATH ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR})

include_directories("${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}")

list(APPEND CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH /usr/local/lib/portaudio/)
find_package( portaudio REQUIRED )

add_executable(portaudio_test ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/portaudio_test.cpp)
target_include_directories(portaudio_test PRIVATE /opt/portaudio/src/common/)
target_link_libraries(portaudio_test portaudio)

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