Bit-perfect sound on FreeBSD

2020-10-24
1 min read

Lately I was listening on my old audio collection and reading man pages and forums, I found out that FreeBSD is an awesome audio platform. This is what I did to achieve bitperfect sound.

Bit perfect

I have an usb external card, so I’m using it as the default audio unit, is simple as that.

/etc/sysctl.conf

dev.pcm.1.play.vchans=0
dev.pcm.1.bitperfect=1
hw.snd.default_unit=1
hw.usb.uaudio.buffer_ms=2
hw.snd.latency=0
kern.timecounter.alloweddeviation=0

/boot/loader.conf

hw.usb.uaudio.default_bits=16
hw.usb.uaudio.default_rate=44100

Then I just use deadbeef to enjoy bitperfect sound.

pkg install deadbeef