I'm planning to start working on improving the aRts documentation.
I'd like to outline my proposal and get feedback on it before I
start.  What I envision is:
- one manual for aRts, including artsbuilder and utilities
- in the standard KDE docbook format
- will go in CVS in kdemultimedia/docs/arts
- will eventually replace the existing documentation
- we can also put it on the aRts web site
- based on material from:
  - aRts 0.3.x manual
  - artsbuilder manual in kdemultimedia
  - misc. docs in kdelibs/arts
  - additional new material

Below is an outline. The aRts 0.3 manual is a very good starting point,
and I've used that as a basis for the outline and plan to take all of
the relevant material from it. I don't feel qualified to write all of the
chapters -- an advantage of a good outline is that other people
can see what work is to be done and work on chapters individually.

Introduction
  What is aRts?
  History

Downloading and Building aRts

ARts in Detail
  Structures
  Streams
  Latency
  Publishing and Dynamic Instantiation
  Busses
  Network Transparency
  Security
  Interfaces and IDL
  Effects and Effect Stacks
  MCOP
  Trader
  MIDI Synthesis
  Autoloading at Startup
  Instruments
  Mapped Instruments
  Mixers
  Session Management
  Full duplex Audio
  GUI Elements

MIDI
  The MIDI Bus Standard
  midisend
  Using aRts & Brahms
  Quick Start 
  More Internal Details
  Other Considerations

GUI Elements
  Introduction
  Parents
  Mixers
 
ARts Application Programming Interfaces
  knotify
  kaudioplayer
  libkmid
  kmedia2
  sound server
  artsflow
  C API

ARts Tools
  artsd/artswrapper
  artsshell
  artsplay
  artsdsp
  artscat
  artscontrol
  arts-config
  Advanced Topics

Artsbuilder
  Overview
  Tutorial

ARts modules
  Introduction
  Synthesis Modules Reference
  Visual Modules Reference

Porting Applications to aRts
  Using artsdsp
  Adding Native aRts support

Contributing to aRts
  Mailing Lists
  Coding Standards

Future Work

References

Appendix
  aRts FAQ
  Contributors
  aRts Copyright and Licensing
  Introduction to Digital Audio
    digital sampling
    filters
    effects
  Introduction to MIDI