Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

On Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 02:04:25AM +0200, vermaden 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.

I've been experiencing audio issues as well since the recent work
started a little while ago (a year? two years? my chronological memory
isn't the best.)

It's broken bad enough that I now don't use audio on my systems at
all. I haven't filed any bug reports, though, because it just hasn't
been a priority for me. I've got tons of other systems where audio
works fine and it's not really a bother to use those instead of my
fbsd/hbsd systems.

The only downside is when I want to make sure the YouTube link I'm
about to post in random places is really the right one from an audio
perspective.

Perhaps some day I'll care enough about the problem to actually dig
in. But for now, I've got higher priority items on my list to tackle.
I just thought I'd provide another anectodal data point with this
email.

Thanks,

-- 
Shawn Webb
Cofounder / Security Engineer
HardenedBSD

Signal Username:  shawn_webb.74
Tor-ified Signal: +1 (719) 756-1197 / activist_opsec.27
https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/pubkeys/-/raw/master/Shawn_Webb/03A4CBEBB82EA5A67D9F3853FF2E67A277F8E1FA.pub.asc