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quite simply arts is dead

http://www.arts-project.org/doc/arts-maintenance.h tml

It was good - but now even the maintainer has jumped ship.

If you have audio syncing issues, use kaffeine ( http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/ - it a really nice kde wrapper for xine, you can easily record streams, minimize to the tray, it has a real nice OSD, I really can't give enough props to the kaffeine project ), configure the xine engine's audio output to be either ALSA or OSS (ie direct to the audio card), right click on the video that is playing go down to Video Settings, there are 5 sliders.
One of those sliders is Audio/Video Offset, this is a xine feature, you can slide it to make the audio and video perfect.

Persoanlly I dont use arts at all - I have an NFORCE2 sound card and while it's features rock, the intel drivers in alsa seriously suck, the closed source nvidia ones are very good, but arts just wont work with it. So I rename the artsd binary (so it can't be used at all) and for system notifications I use a script I wrote called playsound.sh:
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#!/bin/sh /usr/bin/mplayer -ao oss $1

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Hope I helped you and any others out - arts is dead, but thanks to the massive configurability of the KDE project, you don't really need it anyways :)

From the article:

After chatting with Caesar (who also helped test the airpanel), we agreed that this device is really a "glimpse of the future". We imagine that one day we will not need to be right in front of a computer just to control our other computers. We will be able to travel anywhere in a modern city and use an independent, portable device (cell phone, PDA, tablet PC, airpanel, etc.) to access or control the PC sitting at home. Will such a day ever arrive? Who's to say? But the airpanel does seem kind of futuristic.

Such a day came for me a long time ago, when I started running a TightVNC server on my desktop. I can access it on my laptop. I can access it on my PDA (a little cumbersome on my iPaq's 320x240 screen, though). And, here's the best part, I can access it anywhere, through any java-enabled web browser.

VNC, on my home network, is extremely zippy (as in watching DVDs is no problem zippy), and is even entirely useful for web browsing and document editing from far across the Internet. The TightVNC enhancements (integrated JPEG compression, etc.) also make a big difference in maximizing the intelligent use of available bandwidth which, judging by the article, Microsoft's RDC definitely does not. There is, however, one caveat: no integrated audio support. For that, I suppose you'll have to look at the network transparency feature in arts.

Using the DSP wrapper programs, artsdsp or esddsp, you can allow programs to write to OSS-style /dev/dsp and still mix the waveforms in a userspace daemon. Some desktop environments (KDE3) start all programs in such a wrapper by default.

However, combining the overhead of those wrappers with the slowdown of waiting for a user process to mix audio means that even playback of a single mono stream can suffer a perceptible burbling. And if you really start to mix in more streams, it just gets worse.

I can rarely bear to run KDE for more than a few minutes without executing "killall artsd". I intend to get an emu10k card to alleviate the problem (it should let me mix 32+ streams in hardware before I notice the blockage)

The point is not whether it works on Linux, the point is whether there is an open specification. And of those, there are zillions: OpenML, QuickTime, Java Media Framework, GNOME Media Framework, aRts. And these are just some of the most ambitious ones.

Now, after reviewing those links, you'll probably say: "but none of these works! none of them is finished!". And that's exactly my point.

I see a good "multimedia framework" to be the same thing as programming using the GNU tools.

Yes. And that's where you would be wrong. It a completely different thing. One works with text and symbolic representation. The other works with audio and video. There is a reason, you know, why all graphical programming languages to date have failed to gain widespread acceptance: it just doesn't work very well.

Instead of seeing Yet Another video player in gstreamer, you should really be seeing another Mozilla. It's big. It's complicated. It's hard work. People ask what the point of it is. It will be awhile before any good results come out of it. But when(if) it bears fruit, you may well find yourself asking how you did without it.

Uh. While Mozilla is not actually a failure, -- owing more to some incredibly fortuitous circumstances (*cough AOL money cough*) than actual competency on the part of the development team -- Mozilla did fail to satisfy *almost every single goal* that it set out to accomplish. So, yes, why not compare to Mozilla? A slow, bloated, overbearing software project, that's years late? You don't even have to take my word for it: just ask Apple. Hell, ask the Mozilla team themselves: what is Phoenix other than an attempt to salvage Mozilla?

Truly, it's great that Mozilla exists, but the only reason why it's anywhere near useful right now is because the team, after years of overengineering, finally started to worry about how the thing was actually going to be used by actual people. Since that point (about 2 years ago), Mozilla has started to make some great leaps towards usefulness.

It would be very interesting to see MAS compared with similar systems such as NAS and aRts...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

KDE Ships Alpha of Third Generation of the Leading Linux Desktop for Developers

October 5, 2001 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the immediate release of KDE 3.0alpha1, the third generation of KDE's free, powerful and easy-to-use free Internet-enabled desktop for Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.0 is scheduled for its first beta release this December and for final release in late February 2001.

This inaugural release of the KDE 3, which follows two weeks after the stable release of KDE 2.2.1 series, is based on TrollTech's Qt 3.0.0beta6. It ships with the core KDE libraries, the core desktop environment, and over 100 applications from the other base KDE packages (administration, multimedia, network, PIM, utilities, etc.).

The primary goal of the 3.0alpha1 release is to provide a framework for developers to start porting their KDE 2 applications to KDE 3 and to solicit developer feature contributions and feature requests before the KDE 3 API is frozen for binary compatibility. In addition, experimental KDE users who would like to try this release can set up a KDE 3 system side-by-site with a KDE 2 system. Instructions for doing so are available here.

Additional information about KDE 3 is available at the KDE website, including a tentative release plan, a KDE 3 info page, and a list of planned features.

For both developers and users, KDE 3 offers substantial improvements and additions compared to KDE 2 (the great bulk of which are, at this juncture, due to the switch to Qt 3):

For the developer:

For everyone:

Most of these improvements result directly from the switch to Qt 3, which has been the focus of KDE 3 code development so far. Improvements to the KDE libraries and applications themselves are planned for the successive beta releases leading to the first stable KDE 3. A list of these planned features is available here.

Since KDE 3 is mostly source compatible with KDE 2, porting applications from KDE 2 to KDE 3 can usually be done surprisingly quickly. The process is substantially easier than it was for porting from KDE 1 to KDE 2, and even very complicated applications can be ported in a matter of a few hours.

Instructions for porting KDE 2 applications to KDE 3 are available separately for the KDE libraries and the Qt libraries. Most of the changes required for the port applications pertain to changes in the Qt API. Although neither the KDE 3 nor the Qt 3 APIs are frozen, few changes are anticipated for the final releases of KDE 3.0 and Qt 3.0.0, respectively.

KDE and all its components (including KDevelop and KOffice) are available for free under Open Source licenses from the KDE ftp server and its mirrors and can also be obtained on CD-ROM.

Library Requirements. KDE 3.0alpha1 requires qt-3.0.0beta6, which is available in source code from Trolltech as qt-x11-3.0.0-beta6.tar.gz, as well as libxml2 >= 2.3.13, available here.

Compiler Requirements. Please note that some components of KDE 3.0alpha1 will not compile with older versions of gcc/egcs, such as egcs-1.1.2 or gcc-2.7.2. At a minimum gcc-2.95-* is required. In addition, some components of KDE 3.0alpha1 (such as the multimedia backbone of KDE, aRts) will not compile with gcc 3.0 or 3.0.1, though the forthcoming gcc 3.0.2 release will most likely work.

Source Code. The complete source code for KDE 3.0alpha1 is available for free download at http://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/kde-3.0-alpha1 /src/ http://master.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/kde-3.0-alp ha1/src/ or in the equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp server mirrors.

Further Information. For further instructions on compiling and installing KDE 3.0alpha1, please consult the installation instructions and, if you should encounter problems, the compilation FAQ.

KDE is an independent, collaborative project by hundreds of developers worldwide working over the Internet to create a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop environment employing a component-based, network-transparent architecture. KDE provides a stable, mature desktop, an office suite (KOffice), a large set of networking and administration tools, and an efficient and intuitive development environment, including an excellent IDE (KDevelop). KDE is working proof of the power of the Open Source "Bazaar-style" software development model to create first-rate technologies on par with and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

Please visit the KDE family of web sites for the KDE FAQ, screenshots, KOffice information and developer information. Much more information about KDE is available from KDE's family of web sites.

Besides the valuable and excellent efforts by the KDE developers themselves, significant support for KDE development has been provided by MandrakeSoft and SuSE. Thanks!

http://www.arts-project.org

Linux.com happens to be running this article on music creation software under Linux. It mentions projects such as gAlan, a project to create an application for electronic music generation, FreeBirth, an attempt at a ReBirth clone, SoundTracker, Brahms, a MIDI sequencer, and aRts, a analog synthesizer application.
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I'd like to add that KDE2.0 will have a really great multimedia framework based on aRts. aRts is (and will still be) a very modular synthesis software, but the streaming technologies will be all used in KDE, providing a solid base to put multimedia services on. Plugins, streaming, realtime processing, virtual instruments etc. will be possible easily. This is IMHO the way to a unified open multimedia technology. You can download snapshots right now, by the way.

aRts is an advanced multimedia framework. It's about the same as Steinberg's VST technology. Realtime (we're talking milliseconds!) effects, most flexible routing mechanisms (mix, chain and apply filters to any number of audio-channels). Filters are easily plugged in, available are e.g. reverb, delay, chorus, flanger, ...

See aRts' homepage for yourself.