aRts

aRts
Original author(s) Stefan Westerfeld
Developer(s) KDE
Stable release 1.5.9 / February 19, 2008[1]
Development status inactive
Operating system Unix-like
Type Sound server
License GNU General Public License
Website www.arts-project.org

aRts (which stands for analog real time synthesizer) is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is best known for previously being used in K Desktop Environment 2 and 3 to simulate an analog synthesizer.

A key component of aRts is the sound server which mixes several sound streams in realtime. The sound server, called artsd (d for daemon), is also utilized as the standard sound server for K Desktop Environment 2–3. However, the sound server is not dependent on K Desktop Environment and can be used in other projects. It is a direct competitor to JACK Audio Connection Kit, another real-time sound server, and an indirect competitor to the Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESD). It is now common to use ALSA’s software mixing instead of artsd.

The aRts platform also includes aRts Builder — an application for building custom layouts and configurations for audio mixers, sequencers, synthesizers and other audio schema via a user-friendly graphical user interface. aRts is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

End of project

On December 2, 2004 aRts' creator and primary developer Stefan Westerfeld announced he was leaving the project due to a variety of fundamental development and technical issues with aRts.

In KDE Software Compilation 4 developers chose to replace aRts with a new multimedia API known as Phonon.[2] Phonon provides a common interface on top of other systems, usually VLC media player or GStreamer, to avoid being dependent on a single multimedia framework.

See also

References

  1. ↑ http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-3.5.9.php
  2. ↑ “Phonon: Multimedia in KDE 4”, dot.kde.org, 27 April 2006.

External links