So I decided to mess around with FreeBSD on my old Thinkpad more specifically GhostBSD and so far my experience has been very positive except for Ardour.
I cannot get Ardour to output any sound. I have Jack configured and running and I have the master bus outputting to the system playback.
This may be a better question for the FreeBSD forums, but does anyone have experience with setting up Ardour in FreeBSD, any words of wisdom for troubleshooting this before I check with the FreeBSD folks?
I have also tried installing Pipewire and starting it manually and when I start Ardour it does not show up in qpwgraph.
So other apps can play sound while JACK is running (LMMS and Firefox), but I don’t think those two apps are using JACK.
I just tried to install Zynaddsubfx and launched and connected to the outputs in the graph and I am not getting sound perhaps I don’t have JACK setup right.
It doesn’t seem like you have the correct output selected for JACK.
If you had then it would hog the soundcard and LMMS and Firefox shouldn’t be able to play anything without going through JACK (unless the BSD sound stack works differently than in Linux).
Go to the Settings tab in QJackCtl and make sure you have your soundcard selected for your Output and Input Device
Click on the drop-down arrow next to Output Device and see if you can select anything else.
One common problem, in the Windows world at least, is that if you have an HDMI monitor without any speakers it gets selected as the default output device .
Also have a look at the qjackctl’s log window. As @peder mentioned jack likely cannot use the actual soundcard since it is in use, and there may be an error message printed there.
What drivers are available on BSD, is it really only OSS?
