KDE arts: Yes/No ??

jdgill0 · Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 7:27 pm Post subject: KDE arts: Yes/No ??

I have read several post lately that concern arts.

I am starting this thread in hopes to gain a better understanding of the pros/cons of using or not using arts from a technical point of view. It seems half the people using KDE say arts is bad and to not use USE=arts. The other half say that arts is required, else you run the risk of breaking various parts of KDE -- that arts provides more than sound functionality for KDE, and hence support should be added whether or not you actually use arts.

So my questions:
Is arts support truly needed for a consistant and problematic-free usage of KDE?
If it is desired to not use arts, is it better to go ahead and add support then use a different sound player?
What about ogg sound files, if you leave out support for arts will it break ogg support -- even if you have USE=oggvorbis?

NOTE: when I say change the player to something else (maybe alsaplayer), I mean through the Control Center --> Sound & Multimedia --> System Notifications --> Player Settings (lower right corner button) --> Use an external player --> enter alsaplayer.

About everyone using KDE I am sure has their own opinion about arts. I am looking for information that technically supports whether or not arts truly is needed.

If you are using KDE 100% without arts and have zero problems (including playing the system notification sounds which are ogg files), then if you don't mind please share what setup you are using, i.e. what are you using in place of arts and what all did it require to setup?

Thanks.
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reub2000 · Guru Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 355

I'm not using arts, and kde works fine.

jdgill0 · Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 7:46 pm Post subject:

zieloo · Veteran Joined: 28 Mar 2004 Posts: 1337

Arts just suckz. But I use it, no choice right now...

bork_bigjoe · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2005 Posts: 57 Location: Caltech

I use arts and have never had any serious trouble of any kind. Occasionally I run into a program that wants to interact directly with alsa (I think Audacity did this). For that, I either just sit for a minute and let arts time out or, if I'm doing something that requires switching back and forth, I use the arts status monitor (part of the arts control tool) to shut it down on demand. Not ideal -- you don't get to mix simultaneous arts and non-arts sources, but workable for day-to-day use.

Long ago (don't remember if this was with arts or not) when watching videos, I had serious audio sync problems due to buffering. The drivers seem to have improved to manage this -- I never have sync probs.

ande · n00b Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 12

I tried running kde without arts around kde 3.2 i belive. I did this to get rid of some serius lag in audio, watching a movie with arts enabled was impossible (I was watching the entire buffy and angel tv-series at the time). My experience is that making kde work without arts is a pain in the ass, so with 3.3x and 3.4x I've left arts support on, and it seems the lag has been fixed...

Jerem · Apprentice Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 177

USE="-arts" and you will compile kde with the least arts options.

asiobob · Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 9:42 am Post subject:

say goodbye to arts when KDE 4 comes out

Splink · Apprentice Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 259

There are good technical reasons on why to use alsa over arts. I think the main one would be that alsa can handle multi threaded channels, where as arts is something like "sorry mate, im already using that channel, so you are going to have to wait a few mins until its free and then I can use this hardware device to do what you want to do"

This results in a very annoying "/dev/dsp in use" error message if I want to say ... listen to an mp3, while playing quake, while chatting on teamspeak.

The bad thing about alsa (and its really not alsas fault) is that a lot of applications which use sound, will use artsd by default. This can be made to work ok though by setting up your /dev directory.

jdgill0 · Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 1:59 pm Post subject:

Illissius · Guru Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 395 Location: Hungary

jdgill0 · Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 4:34 pm Post subject:

Shotpiece · Apprentice Joined: 01 Jul 2004 Posts: 248

[looking for resolution in this post..]

i'm going to be upgrading to 3.4 myself whenever it hits stable, if ppl like myself throw USE="-arts" before the upgrade will there be any serious problems or no?

jdgill0 · Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 2:02 am Post subject:

My conclusion is that 50% of KDE users will say you don't need arts period, the other 50% will say you need it. (not a scientific conclusion -- more of how I see things).

In light of that, it is possible to build KDE 3.4 with arts, then not use arts. I am currently doing this myself now and it is working quiet well actually. To see how you might do that see this thread, (start at the end of the thread, as you will see it pertains to KDE 3.4 as well as KDE 3.3).

Otherwise, I have not seen enough evidence either way to say yes/no to building KDE 3.4 with arts.
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tam · Guru Joined: 04 Mar 2003 Posts: 569 Location: freiburg.de

I'm running KDE 3.4 with -arts. Everything works fine except the system notifications. Because I really miss the bells and whistles when new mail arrives or someone is querying me in IRC I will reemerge KDE with +arts.

KShots · Guru Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 414 Location: Florida

...interesting. I just re-initialized from stage 1 on my laptop. Previous installation had arts, but it wasn't usable (no audio) and didn't get in the way when games wanted to use it... even though it was in fact running. Now, I have the dreaded "arts is hogging the /dev/dsp" problem while I do indeed get system sounds. I have to disable the sound system to play anything that needs sound (killing artsd just takes it out for a few seconds... then some other process respawns it automatically).

Personally, I don't have much of a problem with arts... but I have major issues with the i8x0 alsa driver being mutually exclusive with anything trying to use it at the same time as anything else. But due to this, I may not be sorry to see it go in KDE4 if something else takes its place that handles all sound output (It's OK to hog the audio output if you guarantee that you will take input from everybody... something I think arts was originally trying to do, but failed).
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elykyllek · Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 8:50 pm Post subject: No arts

Dark_Cloud · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 27

dmitchell · Posted: Fri May 27, 2005 2:53 am Post subject: Re: No arts

F-0_ICE · l33t Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 679

if it wasn't possible to use knotify without arts then the option to use an external player would be useless at least thats my view on it. also i would like to extend my gratitude to elykyllek for the external player it works great with me sound card (in sig). i have been having problems find a sutible external player. thanks.
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Headrush · Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 1:50 pm Post subject:

jdgill0, had it right on the nose.

The problem with arts is how it handles sounds and then passes them on to the backend sound API.

So I have found the best option, like jdgill0 said, is to enable the arts flag for KDE packages you want system notifications, but in kcontrol use an external program to play the sounds. This method prevents the locked sound channel problem and avoids the "bad" problems of arts. (Basically its just a pipe to the player)

This is the only option for playing sounds with some KDE programs that are arts output only. If the package has direct ALSA support, you can just use that.

beatryder · Veteran Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 1138

Headrush · Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2005 11:43 pm Post subject:

F-0_ICE · l33t Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 679

i know all the ones i have work window manager, system notification, etc i don't even have the arts use flag enabled so none of my programs have arts support. the only thing i hate about arts is that it take complete control of my sound card making it qutie difficult to play any other sounds unless i use dmix. but using /usr/bin/play for knotify playback works great for me.
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boniek · Guru Joined: 26 Mar 2005 Posts: 373

Kde 3.4.2 here without arts (for me it is just bloat but needs may vary

). Nvidia Soundstorm APU with Nvidia binary driver (OSS). Sound (flac, ape, ogg, mp3, aac et al) in all media players (bmp, mplayer,flash etc) works (simultaneously too) and that's all about it. Don't know about system notifications as i don't use them.
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