FreeBSD Home Audio Studio

Another guest post by @NeoMoevius from Twitter.

Same as earlier with the Native Urban Terror on FreeBSD article.

This time it will be about setting up Home Audio Studio on a FreeBSD 13.1 system.

The idea is to use software like:

• Jack – audio/jack
• Qtractor – audio/qtractor
• Ardour – audio/ardour
• MuSE Sequencer – audio/muse-sequencer

The first step is to setup Jack on FreeBSD – make sure to setup the realtime mode – this is very important.

Add mac_priority to /etc/rc.conf file and load the mac_priority kernel module.

# echo 'kld_list="${kld_list} mac_priority"' >> /etc/rc.conf

# kldload mac_priority

Then add yourself to realtime group.

# pw groupmod realtime -m yourself

# grep realtime /etc/group         
realtime:*:47:yourself

You will need to install audio/jack package.

% pkg which -o $( which jackd )
/usr/local/bin/jackd was installed by package audio/jack

The /etc/rc.conf part to run Jack is below.

# grep jack /etc/rc.conf
  jackd_enable="YES"
  jackd_user="username"
  jackd_rtprio="YES"
  jackd_args="-r -d oss -r44100 -p1024 -n2 -w16 -i4 -o8 -C /dev/dsp0 -P /dev/dsp0"

The Qtractor will also require audio/alsa-seq-server to work. The good part is that it (the audio/alsa-seq-server package) comes with rc(8) script to start it so you may enable it with service(8) or sysrc(8) commands.

% /usr/local/etc/rc.d/alsa_seq_server rcvar
# alsa_seq_server
#
alsa_seq_server_enable="NO"
#   (default: "")

# service alsa_seq_server enable
alsa_seq_server enabled in /etc/rc.conf

# sysrc alsa_seq_server_enable=YES
alsa_seq_server_enable: YES -> YES

Now all of the above DAW software (or other music programs) should be working properly.

EOF