Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

On Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:38:51 +0200
vermaden <vermaden@interia.pl> wrote:

> > > I will not even start about PITA syntax of mixer(1) which went
> > > into this:
> > > 
> > > % mixer -f ${DEV} vol.volume=+0.05  
> > 
> > Just use gtk-mixer, avail in ports.
> > 
> > In recent years, I haven't noticed any bugs
> > in the operation of the OSS.  
> 
> I do it by scripts anyway ... but I needed to rewrite all my scripts
> because of these changes ... and this change in syntax was bad from
> at least three perspectives:
> 
> 1. It happened in 'point' release (like from .2 to .3) - not in new
> major release - breaking stuff for EVERYONE.
> 
> 2. It happened without any reason - the tool could do the same with
> old syntax underneath - the new syntax does not introduce anything
> new - it just has different syntax.
> 
> 3. As FreeBSD (at least up to some time ago) cherished the POLA
> principle WHY the old syntax could not been also kept and accepted?
> 
> ... and yes - I also think that 'gtk-mixer' works well - so is
> 'dsbmixer' tool.
> 


It’s all rather unpleasant, so whenever I run into this sort of thing, I simply fork the port, revert commits, or add my own fixes.
With Git, maintaining a bunch of "private" patches is very easy and low-effort these days.
https://github.com/rozhuk-im/freebsd/tree/stable/15
https://github.com/rozhuk-im/freebsd-ports/commits/main/


I think you can easily turn the old mixer into a port and keep using it :)