aRts is a short form for "analog realtime synthesizer". The idea of the whole thing is to create/process sound using small modules which do certain tasks. These may be create a waveform (oscillators), play samples, filter data, add signals, perform effects like delay/flanger/chorus, or output the data to the soundcard.
By connecting all those small modules together, you can perform complex tasks like simulating a mixer, generating an instrument or things like playing a wave file with some effects.
All "stable" aRts releases until now (that is until arts-0.3.4) were using CORBA. That was a convenient way to let the GUI components of aRts run in one process, while the sound calculations ran in another. Due to that, a blocking X-Server would never let the sound stop, and the sound server could run as realtime process with very low latency.
However, CORBA has also some disadvantages (for instance speed of communication, the lack to work with "streams" of media, bloat).
MCOP is a try to get around these problems by providing a new, fast IPC mechanism (ORB) for aRts.
Since the "old" aRts releases (until 0.3.4) use CORBA a lot, lots of stuff needs to be redone to get a new release based on MCOP instead of CORBA.
The documentation (currently more or less a collection of associated notes to the aRts/MCOP/KDE developments).
| LICENSE | some notes about the licensing |
| MCOP | the detailed description of the protocol/marshalling MCOP servers use |
| TODO | the TODO list |
| corba-user-intro.html | an introduction to MCOP for CORBA users |
| why-not-dcop.html | details why aRts doesn't use DCOP |
| security.html | description of the MCOP security model |