We are most likely releasing amaroK 1.1 this weekend.

Here's some advice:

Don't use the aRts engine!

[ol]
[*] It almost always requires being made realtime to perform with acceptable drop-outs. When realtime, if artsd should start using 100%, which has been known to happen, your system will lock-up.
[*] It has an inordinately high CPU usage!
[*] We haven't supported the aRts engine since version 0.9!
[*] It has an extremely unresponsive analyzer, unless you reduce the buffer size to < 20ms.
[/ol]

The GStreamer engine has all the features of the aRts engine but supports more media and uses less CPU. You can even set it to output to artsd if you require the sound-server functionality that aRts provides. I should clarify that using aRts as a sound-server and using aRts as a decoding framework are two separate things.

Also I recommend the xine-engine. It is rock solid, supports loads of media (even things like realaudio streams), has a perfectly synced analyzer and has even lower CPU usage than GStreamer. xine is also easier to install than GStreamer as all the dependencies are bundled in the source package. However xine-engine doesn't have crossfading, or support for all kio sources (yet).

We'd be interested to hear your thoughts on engine issues below. Thanks for reading!

Post edited by: mxcl, at: 2004/09/23 21:16

Great anyway, the sound is so sharper in gstreamer than on arts. i might try xine .

i can't wait for the package to come out.

the one thing i miss in gstreamer/xine is the support for musepack, which has been finally included in arts...

Given all that, I wish KDE would start using GStreamer. The reason I like artsd is so that I don't have to worry about programs stealing the sound card from each other. Next version of amarok I'll try gstreamer, maybe set gstreamer to output to arts.

Artsd locking up in realtime mode would explain why Linux locked up when I was trying to use my Gentoo partition with coLinux from Windows. So, good to know why that happened.

manuel wrote:

the one thing i miss in gstreamer/xine is the support for musepack, which has been finally included in arts...

GStreamer supports musepack IIRC. aRts, to my knowledge, has nothing the other systems don't have.