Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

On Thu, Jul 23, 2026, at 6:02 AM, Christos Margiolis wrote:
> On Wed Jul 22, 2026 at 2:05 AM EEST, Shawn Webb wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 01:26:17AM +0300, Christos Margiolis wrote:
>>> On Mon Jul 20, 2026 at 4:59 PM EEST, Shawn Webb wrote:
>>> > 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.
>>> 
>>> Can you mention one example of "bad enough"? I've been lurking this
>>> thread to find concrete problems to work on and I only see stuff like
>>> this.
>>
>> LibreWolf just does not play audio at all now. When I open
>> pavucontrol with a video/audio tab open and playing, LibreWolf isn't
>> even listed in the "Playback" tab. It used to prior to the sound
>> system overhaul.
>
> I daily-drive LibreWolf without any issues. I can listen play sound and
> video call normally. But I use native OSS as the audio backend, not
> pulseaudio or anything else.
>
> You can try setting media.cubeb.backend = oss in about:config.

These are my audio-related ports options that make everything work in Firefox (the only package I use with audio). Basically I just want OSS and the other options are because some other ports need them as alternatives to PULSEAUDIO to build.

OPTIONS_SET=    OSS PORTAUDIO SNDIO
OPTIONS_UNSET=  ALSA JACK PIPEWIRE PULSEAUDIO

Pat