Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

Sound works okay via oss since 14 on this t480 (no pipewire, mangowm). I tried to add pipewire but not seeing any need to—everything works on the audio side. Maybe its KDE/etc?

OSS is great for simple stuff, but it is a shame you have to poll for everything and there is no way to listen for level/device changes.


Regards,
-K.

> On Jul 19, 2026, at 20:06, 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
> 
>