If you are a musician looking to use Surge, please download the appropriate binary from our website. Surge Synth Team makes regular releases for all supported platforms.
Over 2021, after the succesful release of Surge 1.9, the Surge Synth team undertook an effort to rebuild Surge in JUCE
and add a variety of features. This project resulted in the new version of Surge, called 'Surge XT'. The head of this
repo contains the current version of Surge XT. If you are looking to compile a stable production version of Surge, we
tag each release, so if you want to compile Surge 1.9, please check out the release_1.9.0
tag.
Surge is a free and open-source hybrid synthesizer, originally written and sold as a commercial product by @kurasu/Claes Johanson at Vember Audio. In September 2018, Claes decided to release a partially completed version of Surge 1.6 under GPL3, and a group of developers have been improving it since. You can learn more about the team at https://surge-synth-team.org/ or connect with us on Discord .
If you would also like to participate in discussions, testing and design of Surge, we have details below and also in the contributors section of the Surge website.
This readme serves as the root of developer documentation for Surge.
We welcome developers! Our workflow revolves around GitHub issues in this repository and conversations at our Discord server. You can read our developer guidelines in our developer guide document. If you want to contribute and are new to Git, we also have a Git How To, tailored at Surge development.
The developer guide also contains information about testing and debugging in particular hosts on particular platforms.
Surge XT uses CMake for all of its build-related tasks, and requires a set of free tools to build the synth. If you have a development environment set up, you almost definitely have what you need, but if not, please check out:
- Setting up Build Environment on Windows
- Setting up Build Environment on macOS
- Setting up Build Environment on Linux
Once you have set your environment up, you need to checkout the Surge code with Git, grab submodules, run CMake to configure, then run CMake to build. Your IDE may support CMake (more on that below), but a reliable way to build Surge on all platforms is:
git clone https://github.com/surge-synthesizer/surge.git
cd surge
git submodule update --init --recursive
cmake -Bbuild
cmake --build build --config Release --target surge-staged-assets
This will build all the Surge binary assets in the directory build/surge_xt_products
and is often enough of a formula
to do a build.
Our Git How To explains how we are using Git. If you want to develop from your own fork, please
consult there, but the short version is (1) fork this project on GitHub and (2) clone your fork, rather than the main
repo as described above. So press the Fork
button here and then:
git clone git@github.com:youruserid/surge.git
and the rest of the steps are unchanged.
When you run the first CMake step, CMake will generate IDE-compatible files for you. On Windows, it will generate Visual
Studio files. On Mac it will generate makefiles by default, but if you add the argument -GXcode
you can get an XCode
project if you want.
Surge developers regularly develop with all sorts of tools. CLion, Visual Studio, vim, emacs, VS Code, and many others can work properly with the software.
Due to licensing restrictions, VST2 builds of Surge may not be redistributed. However, it is possible to build a
VST2 of Surge for your own personal use. First, obtain a local copy of the VST2 SDK, and unzip it to a folder of your
choice. Then set VST2SDK_DIR
to point to that folder:
export VST2SDK_DIR="/your/path/to/VST2SDK"
or, in the Windows command prompt:
set VST2SDK_DIR=c:\path\to\VST2SDK
Finally, run CMake afresh, and build the VST2 targets:
cmake -Bbuild_vst2
cmake --build build_vst2 --config Release --target surge-xt_VST --parallel 4
cmake --build build_vst2 --config Release --target surge-fx_VST --parallel 4
You will then have VST2 plugins in build_vst2/surge-xt_artefacts/Release/VST
and build_vst2/surge-fx_artefacts/Release/VST
respectively. Adjust the number of cores that will be used for building
process by modifying the value of --parallel
argument.
On Windows, building with ASIO is often preferred for Surge standalone, since it enables users to use the ASIO low-latency audio driver.
Unfortunately, due to licensing conflicts, binaries of Surge that are built with ASIO may not be redistributed. However, you can build Surge with ASIO for your own personal use, provided you do not redistribute those builds.
If you already have a copy of the ASIO SDK, simply set the following environment variable and you're good to go!
set ASIOSDK_DIR=c:\path\to\asio
If you DON'T have a copy of the ASIO SDK at hand, CMake can download it for you, and allow you to build with ASIO under your own personal license. To enable this functionality, run your CMake configuration command as follows:
cmake -Bbuild -DBUILD_USING_MY_ASIO_LICENSE=True
On Linux, using a community fork of JUCE, you can build an LV2. Here's how! We assume you have checked out Surge and can build.
First, clone https://github.com/lv2-porting-project/JUCE/tree/lv2 on branch lv2, to some directory of your chosing.
sudo apt-get install -y lv2-dev
cd /some/location
git clone --branch lv2 https://github.com/lv2-porting-project/JUCE JUCE-lv2
then run a fresh CMake to (1) point to that JUCE fork and (2) activate LV2
cmake -Bbuild_lv2 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DJUCE_SUPPORTS_LV2=True -DSURGE_JUCE_PATH=/some/location/JUCE-lv2/
cmake --build build_lv2 --config Release --target surge-xt_LV2 --parallel 4
cmake --build build_lv2 --config Release --target surge-fx_LV2 --parallel 4
You will then have LV2s in build_lv2/src/surge-xt/surge-xt_artefacts/Release/LV2
and build_lv2/src/surge-xt/surge-fx_artefacts/Release/LV2
respectively.
The CMake target surge-xt-distribution
builds an install image on your platform at the end of the build process. On
Mac and Linux, the installer generator is built into the platform; on Windows, our CMake file uses NuGet to download
InnoSetup, so you will need the nuget.exe CLI in your path.
We have a variety of other CMake options and targets which can allow you to develop and install Surge more easily.
JUCE supports a mode where a plugin (AU, VST3, etc...) is copied to a local install area after a build. This is off by
default with CMake, but you can turn it on with -DSURGE_COPY_AFTER_BUILD=True
at cmake
time.
If you do this on Unixes, building the VST3 or AU targets will copy them to the appropriate local area
(~/.vst3
on Linux, ~/Library/Audio/Plugins
on Mac). On Windows it will attempt to install the VST3, so setting this
option may require administrator privileges in your build environment.
On systems which are UNIX AND NOT APPLE
, the CMake file provides an install target which will install all needed
assets to the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
. This means a complete install can be accomplished by:
cmake -Bignore/sxt -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
cmake --build ignore/sxt --config Release --parallel 8
sudo cmake --install ignore/sxt
and you should get a working install in /usr/bin
, /usr/share
and /usr/lib
If you are building with Visual Studio 2019, use the -A
flag in your CMake command to specify 32/64-bit:
# 64-bit
cmake -Bbuild -G"Visual Studio 16 2019" -A x64
# 32-bit
cmake -Bbuild -G"Visual Studio 16 2019" -A Win32
If you are using an older version of Visual Studio, you must specify your preference with your choice of CMake generator:
# 64-bit
cmake -Bbuild -G"Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64"
# 32-bit
cmake -Bbuild -G"Visual Studio 15 2017"
To build a fat binary on a Mac, simply add the following CMake argument to your initial CMake run:
-D"CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES=arm64;x86_64"
To build for a Raspberry Pi, you want to add the LINUX_ON_ARM
CMake variable when you first run CMake. Otherwise, the
commands are unchanged. So, on a Pi, you can do:
cmake -Bbuild -DLINUX_ON_ARM=True
cmake --build build --config Release --target surge-staged-assets
To cross-compile for aarch64, use the CMake Linux toolchain for aarch64, as shown in the Azure pipeline here:
cmake -Bignore/xc64 -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=cmake/linux-aarch64-ubuntu-crosscompile-toolchain.cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=DEBUG -GNinja
cmake --build ignore/xc64 --config Debug --target surge-headless
Of course, that toolchain makes specific choices. You can make other choices as long as (1) you set the CMake variable
LINUX_ON_ARM
and (2) you make sure your host and your target compiler are both 64-bit.
Surge cross-compiles to macOS Intel from Linux and BSD.
- Install osxcross. Make sure to also install the
libclang_rt
library built by theirbuild_compiler_rt.sh
script. - Configure and build Surge:
cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=cmake/x86_64-apple-darwin20.4-clang.cmake -DCMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH=<path_to_osxcross_sdk> -Bbuild
cmake --build build
You need to install the following:
- Visual Studio 2017, 2019, or later(version 15.5 or newer)
- Install Git , Visual Studio 2017 or newer
- When you install Visual Studio, make sure to include CLI tools and CMake, which are included in 'Optional CLI support' and 'Toolset for desktop' install bundles
To build on macOS, you need Xcode
, Xcode Command Line Utilities
, and CMake. Once you have installed
Xcode
from the App Store, the command line to install the Xcode Command Line Utilities
is:
xcode-select --install
There are a variety of ways to install CMake. If you use homebrew, you can:
brew install cmake
Most Linux systems have CMake, Git and a modern C++ compiler installed. Make sure yours does. We test with most gccs
older than 7 or so and clangs after 9 or 10. You will also need to install a set of dependencies. If you use apt
, do:
sudo apt install build-essential libcairo-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxcb-cursor-dev libxcb-keysyms1-dev libxcb-util-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libasound2-dev libjack-jackd2-dev
You can find more info about Surge on Linux and other Unix-like distros in this wiki article.
In addition to the build commands above, we use Azure pipelines for continuous integration. This means that each and every pull request will be automatically built across all our environments, and a clean build on all platforms is an obvious pre-requisite. If you have questions about our CI tools, don't hesitate to ask on our Discord server. We are grateful to Microsoft for providing Azure pipelines for free to the open-source community!