Building from source

Dependencies

You will need cmake, libsndfile, libpng, libtiff, FreeType, SQLite, OpenSSL and zlib installed. You also have SDL3, libsusb and X11 headers as optional dependencies.

CMake fetches by itself WebP, Lua, NanoSVG, the plug-in SDKs and FFTW so keep that in mind if you want to package it.

Getting the source

You can just clone:

git clone https://github.com/ekphore/ekphore
git clone https://github.com/ekphore/libnki
git clone https://github.com/ekphore/libnks
git clone https://github.com/ekphore/libksp

Building

From the root folder, you can build ekphore with a bog standard cmake build:

cmake -S ekphore -B ekphore/build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build ekphore/build --parallel
./ekphore/build/ekphore-ui

You can also build the libraries separately in a similar fashion if you so want.

There is a few additional compile-time toggles you may want to modify, they are listed below:

Option	Default	What it does
EKPHORE_BUILD_STANDALONE_UI	ON	Build the standalone app (needs SDL3)
EKPHORE_BUILD_CLAP	ON	Build the CLAP plug-in
EKPHORE_BUILD_VST3	ON	Build the VST3 plug-in
EKPHORE_BUILD_LV2	ON	Build the LV2 plug-in
EKPHORE_BUILD_AU	ON (macOS)	Build the AUv2 plug-in
LIBNKS_BUILD_DAEMON	ON	Build nksd, which plug-ins need for keyboard integration
LIBNKS_BUILD_EXAMPLES	ON	Build the libnks SDK examples
LIBNKI_BUNDLED_KEY_PATH	empty	Embeds Kontakt's private key. DO NOT REDISTRIBUTE IF YOU ENABLE THIS TOGGLE.
EKPHORE_NATIVE_GRAIN_FFTW_ARCHIVE	empty	Path to the official FFTW tarball for offline builds
EKPHORE_NATIVE_GRAIN_FFTW_INCLUDE_DIR	empty	Use a prebuilt FFTW instead of building it; set together with …_LIBRARY
EKPHORE_NATIVE_GRAIN_FFTW_LIBRARY	empty	The prebuilt static library matching …_INCLUDE_DIR