Well, I'm posting this to the lists incase somebody has experienced this 
and/or has a solution.  I built KDE-3.1.2 using the kde3 "wrapper" package 
and everything installed smoothly.  Artsd starts without any problems and 
plays "notifications" fine. I have two problems though:  Artsd apparently 
only plays .wav files and no other packages find arts when compiling (another 
thing: artsdsp doesn't work, all programs core dump).
	As previously stated artsd plays kde notifications fine but, nothing else.  I 
have tried to play .mp3 and .ogg files in noatun unsuccessfully (it just soft 
hangs in a "play" state but, makes no decoding progress) however, I can play 
all .wav files through noatun.  I beleive this is an arts problem not noatun 
because sound previews don't work either (purely arts, right?).  I would test 
with another player if not for my second problem.
	When building other multimedia packages (mplayer, xmms) the arts includes are 
not found by configure.  For instance: mplayer did not build with arts output 
and neither did xmms.  I tried a hack with xmms which did not work: I 
modified the Makefile to pass --enable-arts to configure - this caused a 
build fail when the xmms-arts plugin tried to include arts headers that 
didn't exist.  I would also try playing other formats with another player via 
artsdsp however, this isn't working.  I've tried mpg123 and xmms but, they 
both give Segmentation fault errors.

--
Nate Hill <vugdeox@freeshell.org>