Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

i wonder if it's audio hw being crap in idle mode? if so, devs also have same cursewords to shout. just look comments on rtl nic drivers

very funnily this audio chip could ALSO (now actually shouting) be rtl

<https://www.kimjongrails.com/blog/realtek-the-crab/>

i'm not familiar with dac's and sound

also, that also happens directly from sound card too?

to me it looks as if something is trying to switch (pre)amp to "quiet" mode from lack or input but instead this happens

and it's only fbsd issue?

sure, not many people use fbsd daily. which is fun, because nowadays you can have multiple physical machines. each with own os. depends on setup, quite decent machine could be on verge of being e-waste

i don't currently do it anymore. but that's because lack of willpower to properly setup a next laptop. previous one broke years ago. it was new old stock t60 which i truly used until it broke somehow internally

so once i get my will back, i just use phones (lol) to ssh into fbsd



On July 20, 2026 3:04:25 AM GMT+03:00, vermaden <vermaden@interia.pl> wrote:
>Hi.
>
>For a start lets define some TERMS. I use UPPERCASE not to shout - but to underline a part of the sentence that is needed to be underlined - this is plain email - I do not have Bold/Underscore/Italic options - keep that in mind - now - to the core of the issue ...
>
>I always considered FreeBSD OSS audio/sound subsystem superior to all ALSA/PulseAudio/PipeWire and other dramas from the Linux world ... but not anymore.
>
>Somewhere between 14.3-RELEASE and 14.4-RELEASE things begin to get broken - I thought that upgrade to latest and greatest 15.1-RELEASE would solve my issues - as there were LOTS of sound/audio related things.
>
>I will not even start about PITA syntax of mixer(1) which went into this:
>
>% mixer -f ${DEV} vol.volume=+0.05
>
>... from MUCH MORE friendly syntax.
>
>But these random 'boozing' sounds are just unacceptable ... and I can not even tell where they came from ... is it OSS problem? Is is PulseAudio problem? Something in between? Because there is NOTHING in the logs for audio.
>
>Its also possible to get that file from my personal 'mediafire.com' account here:
>- https://mediafire.com/file/jw3cpk8g77rvks2/freebsd-tragic-audio-sound.mp4/file
>
>... and its not some fancy laptop from yesterday ... its a ThinkPad T480 from 2018 for fuck sake - hardware like that used to run smooth as Carlos Sainz 'smooth operator' in Singapore GP ... but not anymore.
>
>I do not even know what to add here ... its a message send our of despair ... as newer releases only made these things worse ... I have been repeating this over and over again - but its again probably the issue that 'too less' FreeBSD developers use FreeBSD as their daily driver/desktop/laptop system.
>
>Sorry to disappoint.
>
>Regards,
>vermaden
>
>