# Announcing the Unofficial Pro-Audio Arch Package Repository (Beta Phase)

## Where?

https://arch.osamc.de/

## What?

An actively maintained binary package repo for Arch Linux of free and open source pro-audio software.

The repository only provides packages that are not already in the official Arch Linux repository.

The repository is maintained and tested for both x86_64 and aarch64 (Arch Linux ARM) architectures.

## Why?

1. We are convinced that Arch Linux is currently the best free platform for audio production and we want to help improving it further. 2. Having more up-to-date and easy to install packages of useful audio production software is always a good thing. 3. The pro-audio packages in the `extra` and `community` package repositories are currently maintained by only one person. We want to distribute the workload and spread the packing expertise between more people and decrease the "bus-factor". 4. We want to create packages, which can eventually be migrated to the official repositories with no or minimal changes. We do not intend to duplicate the packaging efforts from the official repos.

## How?

See the web site for instructions on how to add the repository to your Arch System (or derivatives). The repository is also listed on the [Unofficial user repositories] page on the Arch Wiki.

We are still stabilizing the build process and packaging conventions. While this is going on, we consider the repository to be in a *Beta quality stage*. We currently have around two dozen projects packaged and ready to install and plan to add many more over time.

We try to announce important changes on IRC (`#archlinux-proaudio` on `irc.libera.chat`) and always keep the information on the Arch Wiki page up to date.

**Note:** *Our build process is currently not based on the official Arch Linux `devtools`, but we adhere strictly to the Arch Packaging guidelines and test all package builds via our CI. With the Arch Packaging infrastructure expected to evolve significantly in the near future, we plan to adapt our tooling to whatever the outcome of that will be.

## Contributing

Contributions are welcome! To suggest software for inclusion in the repo open a GitHub issue.

### PKGBUILD and CI Code Repository and Issue Tracker:

https://github.com/osam-cologne/archlinux-proaudio

### Team-Chat

Discussion and coordination of the project happens on the Sonoj Rocket Chat instance. If you are interested in helping out or have questions or suggestions, join the general chat room (no registration required, English):

https://chat.sonoj.org/channel/english

[Unofficial user repositories]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unofficial_user_repositories#proaudio