# Chapter 1. Introduction

# 1.1. What is aRts?

Arts expands to "analog realtime synthesizer", but when you are reading this documentation, you perhaps already know...

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.

Over the time, it has evolved to be useful for a wider range of applications than only analog synthesis. Arts has become an audio middleware, which may solve tasks like full duplex effect processing, midi synthesis, audio server functionality, emulation of a sampler, .... Others like hard disk recording might follow.

An important change happened with the integration of aRts in the KDE2.0 Desktop. It now provides the base for many multimedia services there, most visible of course as always running sound server which allows you to run multiple applications which use the sound device at once.

This program (Arts Builder) is distributed under the GPL (Gnu Public License). Many parts of aRts are also distributed under the LGPL (Gnu Lesser Public License), to allow using aRts with non-GPL'd software.