arts sound server
 

How does this thing work? I suspect you have to turn it on and then configure your audio stuff to run via the sound server isn't it? Does it mean you have to run all programs via the command line with artsdsp (program name)? Cause I can't find an option in say xmms, which doesn't work when I have the sound server on (cause that blocks my default device)

Also is it any good? Can it make realplayer use this and that I get sound from it cause I can't configure anything in realplayer itself and I need to play a new file that can't be played with the old codec from mplayer.

Unfortunately I can't help as I'm having trouble with my
microphone. But here's some docs links that might help.

http://www.arts-project.org/ (look around)
http://www.arts-project.org/doc/handbook/
http://www.arts-project.org/doc/manual/index-3.htm

I know there is a GUI Window for Arts, on Xandros,
I have "Audio Builder" from /usr/bin/artsbuklder

If you are doing simple recording/playing, then
arecord/aplay is sufficient. If you want multiple
sounds, the Arts is needed. (My understanding,
but I could be wrong. Someone corrects me if
wrong.)

Sheng-Chieh

first of all sound routing and drivers in Linux is a MESS !
hopefully this all will work itself out as an understandable standard some day
application have to be "aware" of or able to be configured to use the sound server/driver
there is a plugin for arts output in xmms
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/.../xmmsarts/0.4/
some people experience problems with this plugin -- i have never tried it
other people say it works great
yes i think you can try
artsdsp someapp
and see if it will work (arts has bad latency problems)
arts is functional only if all you want it to do is play a sound when you do a gui thing and arts thankfully becomes a thing of the past in kde4
i might be wrong about this stuff but
my personal opinion -- since arts is really only doing software mixing and alsa does software mixing on it's own (not that well)-- and lots of modern sound cards can actually do hardware mixing ! -- i would just disable arts from starting in kde controll because it is inherently a drag on latency and a big drag on performance. i sort of look at it as a holdover from pre alsa days when there was no sound polling at all.
alsa is actually a sound server itself accepting both multiple kernel (driver) level clients and multiple user level clients and performing complex routing tasks. and also already mapps old code using oss devices to alsa devices. (again all of this doesn't work all that well)
can't use kde knotiffy gui sound event thingy then but who cares.
if you need a sound server look into jack -- it opens up new worlds of low latency posibilities.
or it is just a hack that bypasses all the cruft and blows past alsa for applications that are aware of it.
and makes thing even more confusing ???? anyway jack in my opinion actually works really well.

Thanks for the info! Well if arts is going to be killed anyway I won't start at trying that. Think I'll go with alsa then anyway, though I hate I have to do that scripting stuff to get it to work cause I use AC97. Then I hope realplayer will play sound properly but otherwise I at least have sound in my other programs