Situation is as follows:

1) aRts-engine is currently unmaintained (and has been for quite some time). The longer it stays unmaintained, the more bugs will show up, especially subtle incompatibilities with newer KDE releases. Also, aRts itself is basically dead and unmaintained.

2) None of our devs uses aRts these days. We\'re lacking both the time and motivation to maintain aRts engine.

3) From user feedback we have learned that many folks still use the aRts engine. Any crashes/problems with the engine will automatically have a negative effect on amaroK\'s overall reputation, as the common user can\'t usually tell what the cause of a problem is. At some point (perhaps for 1.2 final) we will be forced to disable this engine entirely, if a new maintainer cannot be found.


So, if you are interested in doing the job, please let us know.

Did you ever get a volunteer? I have been looking at the arts and xine engine code because I\'ve been building a helix/realplayer engine for amarok. I have a basic working setup, so in the process i\'ve picked up a bit of knowledge about the arts engine. Seems to be still working for me - I might be willing to pick up maintenance.

Is there any interest in including a helix/realplayer engine in the distribution? I have separated the helix code into a separate shared library (much like the xine-lib). I did this because the real licence says that if you include any of their code you would be subject to their licence first and then GPL (assuming you were releasing under GPL). The sound is really crisp using helix. I am loading the stock helixplayer or realplayer shared libs, so it is a prereq that one of those be installed.

I dont have a working scope, crossfader, or equalizer yet, but all are possible. I\'d be interested in comments.

PC

i still use Arts output on amarok 1.3.7 and kde 3.5.0 without any issues.


out of interest

what programming languages do
Arts,
amarok-arts-engine,
and Amarok itself use?

It is all done in C++!

And yes, some people have no problems whatsoever

You should join us in the irc channel if you are interested, all development is centered around irc really!

#amarok on irc.freenode.net