aRts simulates a complete "modular analog synthesizer" on your -
digital - computer. Create sounds & music using small modules like
oscillators for creating waveforms, various filters, modules for playing
data on your speakers, mixers, faders,... You can build your complete
setup with the GUI of the system, using the modules - generators, effects
and output - connected to each other.
New synthesis modules can easily be written and integrated in the
aRts system. The artsd sound server mixes audio from several
sources in real time, allowing multiple sound applications to transparently
share access to sound hardware.
Using MCOP, the Multimedia Communication Protocol, multimedia applications
can be network transparent, authenticated for security, and cross-platform
using interfaces defined in a language-independent way using IDL. As a core
component of the KDE 2 desktop environment, aRts provides the basis for the
KDE multimedia. It can also be used independently of KDE (i.e. uses no Qt-
or KDE-libs for most things).
This program is distributed under the GPL (Gnu Public License). Read
the COPYING-file inside the archive carefully. Large parts of aRts
are also under LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License), which allows
using the aRts libraries even in proprietary software.