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This is the native audio subsystem used by OpenBSD, it includes a library (libsndio) and a privsep server (sndiod). There was a massive successful undertaking to write backends for most 3rd party audio software in the ports tree, things like chromium, and it is now included upstream in SDL, OpenAL, Mozilla Firefox, mpd, etc.

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There is a good support for sndio in the FreeBSD ports tree as well. Albeit hidden behind the SNDIO build time option. It was quite the ride to get it to that point :-)

There are also now some sndio backends out there for applications not in the OpenBSD ports tree like Cava, shairport-sync, and Kodi.

voidlinux's firefox package has sndio support in it. It takes very little cpu to run this unlike pulseaudio which would kill this little underpowered laptop I'm currently on (several generations old sual dore atom).

For Pulseaudio please file bugreports. Could be that it's transcoding things (44.1kHz to 48kHz conversion, etc).

I have a pretty slow CPU (NUC5PPYH) and Pulseaudio has been working fine for loads of years.

> voidlinux's firefox package has sndio support in it.

Wow, didn't know that. I'm a fan of all three but no time to muck around with distros. Might reconsider.

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