Troubleshooting

no sound on FreeBSD

If you have correctly configured spotifyd to use portaudio and everything seems to be working except that there's no sound, you might have to switch to a different audio device.

If you have portaudio as your backend and set your device to ?, spotifyd will output all of the available PortAudio devices it can find on your system. This could look like the following

- /dev/dsp0 (default)
- /dev/dsp1
- /dev/dsp2
- /dev/dsp

Assume that the 4th device (index 3, starting from 0, /dev/dsp) is the output device that is needed. That coincides with the pcm3 (also index 3, starting from 0) device that FreeBSD lists in dmesg as well as the hw.snd.default_unit=3 sysctl that is used to set the device as OSS's default. It seems like the index number correlates across each of those enumerations.

After setting device = "/dev/dsp" in the config, the sound should start working. If not, you can try the other possible values that are available.