# USB Sound Card OSS - no sound.....



## TN-048 (Jun 19, 2011)

This is my first post on this forum so I hope you can all tolerate my n00b-ness ^^

I decided to make the plunge and switch over to FreeBSD from Linux. One of my boxes has no integrated sound card and no open slots for a PCI card, so my alternative was a (very) cheap C-Media USB sound card. It works fine in Windows and alright in Linux, it even worked in a PC-BSD install I had for a while. But now with a fresh FreeBSD install I cannot get it to work at all. The system seems to not recognize it as a sound card but it is recognized as being there. I compiled OSS from ports which I expected to work (as this is what was on PC-BSD) but alas, it did not.

*cat /dev/sndstat* outputs 
	
	



```
OSS 4.2 (b 2004/201106172253)BSD (C) 4Front Technologies 1996-2009
Kernel: FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p2 #1: Fri Jun 17 17:34:08 EDT 2011
    tom@Tyranitar:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/TN048


Audio devices:

MIDI devices:

Mixers:


NOTICE! Device numbers shown above may be wrong.
        Use the ossinfo command to find out the correct device names.
```
and *ossinfo* outputs 
	
	



```
ersion info: OSS 4.2 (b 2004/201106172253) (0x00040100) BSD
Platform: FreeBSD/i386 8.2-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p2 #1: Fri Jun 17 17:34:08 EDT 2011     tom@Tyranitar:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/TN048 (Tyranitar)

Number of audio devices:        0
Number of audio engines:        0
Number of MIDI devices:         0
Number of mixer devices:        0


Device objects

MIDI devices (/dev/midi*)

Mixer devices

Audio devices

Nodes
```

Any idea how to fix this? If all else fails I guess I can try to get a regular sound card that will fit in one of my PCI-X slots.. Thanks for any help!


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## adamk (Jun 20, 2011)

OSSv4 does not support USB audio on FreeBSD.  Did you try the snd_uaudio module that comes with FreeBSD?


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## jb_fvwm2 (Jun 20, 2011)

In March-2011 I wrote a short howto in the Howto subforum; have you tried the equivalent commands on your system? Not using that computer at the moment, or I could post something more helpful possibly.


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## TN-048 (Jun 20, 2011)

@ adamk: Yes, I've tried it but still nothing.. And if USB audio is unsupported then I don't know how I had it in PC-BSD.. Could it have had something to do with KDE being installed? It's compiling at the moment so I'll see if that helps the issue when it's done. 

@ jb_fvwm2: I have OSS load in my rc.conf so those commands don't really help me (providing the post I found was the proper one. Is this it?) OSS just isn't detecting my hardware at all..


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## jb_fvwm2 (Jun 20, 2011)

That is the post I referred to; I don't know anything about USB audio, but more OSS commands than implicitly result from the rc.conf load line may result in the hardware being detected (an additional OSS4 driver loading, then the devices appearing subsequently).  So it is a "maybe, maybe not" fix that would take a while to discover, probably using 
	
	



```
kldload ... # to load additional drivers
```
 all the OSS drivers from its pkg-plist, 
	
	



```
ls -lac /dev  # to check if more devices created
```
 and the referenced post or more commands than were in it.


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## SirDice (Jun 21, 2011)

Keep in mind that after loading snd_uaudio(4) you need to re-insert the USB audio for it to detect.


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## TN-048 (Jun 24, 2011)

Ah, that ended up being exactly what the problem was.... After removing/replacing the card it began working flawlessly with VLC and such. Thank you very much!


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