kde-3.3 -arts ...is it worth it?

hook · Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 6:20 am Post subject: kde-3.3 -arts ...is it worth it?

I know there's a separate thread describing how it's done ...I'm just curious if it's worth it? What are the users' experiences with it?
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Regor · Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 7:35 am Post subject:

Arts is garbage. Terminate it with extreme prejudice with USE="-arts".
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hook · Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 10:02 am Post subject:

Regor · Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 11:26 am Post subject:

I've been happy with KDE 3.3.0. I am pleased that with "-arts" in USE, it is no longer installed at all. I don't really know if the kde sound stuff doesn't work without arts, since I never really use any of it anyway.
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Voltago · Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 11:45 am Post subject:

Unfortunately, K3B and amaroK won't compile unless kdelibs and/or kdebase are compile with arts support.

hook · Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 2:02 pm Post subject:

JackDog · Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 3:27 pm Post subject:

My vote is that it is not work doing a USE="-arts". Compile it in just dont use it.

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

I'm on 3.3.0 -arts right now. It's pretty great to be able to watch movies in kmplayer without the picture completely falling apart due to arts being a piece of crap. Everything that I want to have sound (eg amaroK) does, and I don't care about the rest (eg 'system sounds', which I methodically disable). The only problem I've had is that some of the strangest stuff has arts as a dependency, such as a neat window decoration I found on kde-look.org. I mean, wtf?
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snuffer · Apprentice Joined: 12 Jun 2004 Posts: 207 Location: Israel

I like the kde sounds. What i did was to compile kde with arts support but then disable arts and change the sounds to use "aplay". Works for me and arts isnt running.
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zerojay · Veteran Joined: 09 Aug 2003 Posts: 1033

Compiling KDE without arts isn't supported by KDE at the moment. There are programs which still rely on arts to work properly.

Arts is a great sound server. I never have any problems with it whatsoever except with occasional audio latency, which you can fix by dropping the buffer about halfway.

I'd say that you're better off compiling KDE with arts support and then just not using it. Besides, it's not like you're going to be saving much time or disk space by not compiling it and you might introduce other problems into your KDE installation.

Dont know anything · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2003 Posts: 60

Im running KDE 3.3.0 and have -arts in my use flag. So far i dont have any troubles with it. I have not tried running amarok yet, since i prefer xmms. Everything seems to working good though.

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

Frogblast · n00b Joined: 28 Aug 2004 Posts: 13

How does one disable arts? Arts alone renders KDE completely unusable for me, so I'm still using Gnome 2.8 even though I promised myself I would give KDE a chance...

When I do get sound, there is half second latency, it sometimes comes out garbled, artsd crashes constantly, and Juk and most other media players freeze or crash within a second or two of starting to play audio. (amd64, audigy2, alsa with OSS emulation disabled, genkernel 2.6.7)

This system should be capable of doing hardware mixing directly through ALSA (I've confirmed this by having multiple aplay processes running concurrently), so I don't see the need for having ESD or ARTS around.

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

Just add -arts to your USE flags, and use KDE 3.3 or later. And unmerge arts, if you want to. If you need to install something outside portage and it complains about arts missing, you can try doing configure with --without-arts.
Warning: Compiled with -arts, it seems JuK didn't compile at all, as I'm not finding it anywhere; there may be others, but I haven't looked for them. I use amaroK though so it doesn't really concern me.
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Trejkaz · Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2004 1:01 pm Post subject:

evoweiss · Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2004 4:01 pm Post subject:

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

evoweiss · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 5:37 am Post subject:

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

well i had to specify it being a i8x0 audio card. and i found the -q cause i need to minimize disc accses on my laptop.

thechris · Veteran Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 1203

as for cheap sound cards -- i think the aureal vortex cards have hardware mixing. i know my 8830 did. one word of adivce -- find the amplifier control and "mute" it. muting it turns it on... this fixes a lot of problems.

jdgill0 · Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 6:19 pm Post subject:

Just wanted to *bump* this thread to keep it from getting lost. There seems to have been several KDE+sound threads lately.

The method listed above seems to be working good for me in KDE 3.4. I re-iterate here what I did according to the previous posts in this thread:

# NOTE: before doing step three see "Create allplayer" below.
1) emerge kde with USE="arts oggvorbis" ... do this regardless
2) Control Center --> Sound & Multimedia --> Sound System --> UNCHECK "Enable the sound system"
3) Control Center --> Sound & Multimedia --> System Notifications --> Player Settings (button in lower right corner) --> Use an external player --> Player: allplayer

# Create allplayer
1) Create the file /usr/bin/allplayer
2) chmod 755 allplayer
3) Add the following as its contents

Caustiq · n00b Joined: 29 Aug 2004 Posts: 57

Trejkaz · Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2005 10:34 am Post subject:

jdgill0 · Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2005 11:02 am Post subject:

From my testing, it seems that multiple events, both playing ogg files, play at the same time. The test I used was to open two konsole sessions, in the first play ogg123 KDE_Startup_2.ogg, and in the second play ogg123 Kopete_Received.ogg. Both files are found in /usr/kde/3.4/share/sounds. The KDE_Startup_2.ogg is fairly long and gives plenty time to switch to the other console and play Kopete_Received.ogg. I can definitely hear both sounds at the same time.

I have also been watching a DVD movie and at the same time receive email, for which both sounds play at the same time.

Although what I presented is not the most rigorous test, I believe Trejkaz is correct, that KDE spawns a new script process for each event.
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Caustiq · n00b Joined: 29 Aug 2004 Posts: 57

The test I tried was as follows. To switch virtual desktops in KDE, I can scroll the desktop with the mouse wheel. This triggers an ogg to play for each virtual desktop change using KDE's builtin sound notifications. Usually, when I scrolled very fast I would hear very many sounds all at once, but this wasn't the case. It would only play one sound at a time, ignoring the others. I was watching my process list in real time too, and ogg123 would not be invoked twice.

So after my modification it fixed the problem. This is on KDE 3.4.