From owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org  Wed Jul 19 09:47:53 2017
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Subject: Re: Can I use FreeBSD as a desktop system?
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From: Heikki Lindholm <holin@iki.fi>
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Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2017 12:47:47 +0300
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On 19.07.2017 12:28, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jul 2017 09:41:22 +0200
> Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>> Professional real-time audio doesn't work at all.
> 
> 	Is that due to lack of support for the APIs normally used or
> because the underlying sound system is not good enough ?
> 
> 	I certainly had no problems with sound system latency way back when
> I was getting the brooktree video capture cards to work properly (there
> were sync detection bugs) and talk to ffmpeg - that was nearly 20 years
> ago, I'd like to think things have got better not worse :)

Latency is just one aspect. Hardware timestamping, callbacks, low-level 
access to device data without kernel conversions and synchronization 
aids is what pro audio likes. IMHO, no open source OS has a good (pro) 
audio API, but the development has centered on Linux and ALSA w/jack is 
already workable.