Re: aRts and Gnome

[Stefan Westerfeld <stefan space twc de>]

   Hi!

On Sat, Nov 13, 1999 at 02:53:47PM -0600, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> > That KDE2 will be using aRts has been definitely decided at the KDE-TWO
> > conference. After showing aRts at the conference everybody afterwards was
> > happy that it could go into KDE2 ;) - ask any core developer who was there.
> 
> It would be helpful to know what arts is.

Well, sure. I was assuming that every person on the world should already
know ... ;) there was a gnome-kde-thread on that before.

  But to give a brief summary:

aRts is basically a modular, component oriented audio flow system. That
means it allows you to define flow graphs of small modules, connecting
them together, and means to "simulate" these flow graphs. The central
goal of the development in the last two years was modular music
synthesis. So things like oscillators, filters, players for wav files,
mixers, etc. are implemented.

On the other hand, also GUI components are implemented, which allow you
to do the UI of the signal flow just with the same modularity as the
signal flow itself. In the UI, you have things like sliders, panels,
knobs, labels, ... (and probably with the time visual feedback elements
like leds, scopes, ... will get added).

aRts is an ancronym for analog realtime synthesizer, and it works fine
as such, doing realtime live midi synthesis, realtime full duplex effect
processing and things like that.

But due to its power, it also makes the ultimate sound server. If you
look at esd, it's quite fixed. It mixes some streams and plays them.

With aRts on the other hand, you get a flexible sound server, which can
simulate anything, from simply playing the mp3 you want to hear, 'til
being a virtual studio with mixers, effect racks, synthetic instruments,
etc.

So you can simply hear your mp3, or hear it with effects, or play doom
while hearing your mp3 with effects, or real compose music while still
being able to hear your window manager sounds, etc. - well and of course
still having real, real low latency.

The idea is that KDE will be moving to that technology now - first as
audio server. We intend to care about more multimedia services later, such
as midi (well, at least: more midi stuff), video & whatever else, using the
same component oriented approach.

As I said: there is quite some documentation at

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                      http://linux.twc.de/arts
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and while lots of stuff is specifically for those people who want a
synthesizer, it shall give you a good idea what it can do (see section#11
for remarks about aRts as general purpose audio server).

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
  -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan@space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
     KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-