Alda on Raspberry Pi

[daveyarwood]

Continuing from conversations in the Alda Slack group, tracking the work to be done here:

• Add ARM builds to client/bin/build (currently only on the arm-build branch)
• Tune JVM options so that alda-player processes use less memory?
• Add arm64 release testing to CircleCI build (looks like they don't support 32-bit ARM, so can't test ARM 7)
• Update Alda API to include arm-7 and arm64 releases
• Ensure that alda update can find the right releases for ARM 7, arm64
• Ensure that ARM releases are included at alda.io/install

[Arthurmeade12]

As of June 2025 (Edit: as of 688a915), I was able to build a working alda install for my arm64 Fedora Desktop with no changes to the code, except adding build linux arm64 to the end of client/bin/build . So, to anyone else out there with an arm64 linux machine - and some knowledge of how to manually build and install cli projects - this is working.
Proof: https://asciinema.org/a/ykArg3dFCR86itlsV5nacKvBQ (this will expire on 6/30/2025)

@daveyarwood could you be persuaded to add this to the official builds on alda.io? Thanks for making a great project!

[daveyarwood]

That's great! Yes, I was already planning to do that eventually. I even made this branch back in 2021 that included similar changes to the build script.

I don't really do anything with Raspberry Pi myself (although I think they're cool), but it's nice to know that there is still interest in getting Alda to run on it!

I'll try to find some time soon to test that branch and merge it, and then work on getting ARM builds included in the official builds on the website.