While some use the documentation correctly and search the mailing lists, sometimes the answers don’t come up correctly due to formatting or google having issues indexing.
As I use OpenBSD more and more as a daily driver (be it still in VMWare Workstation on one machine and Virtual Box on the other), I still don’t have it on raw workstation hardware. I want my audio and video to work but out of the box on the above platforms, but my audio was either sketchy or non-existent.
I knew the audio device was working correctly through some of the standard tests and getting garbage out of speakers, but software still wasn’t playing nicely. After a bit of searching and reading the man page, a simple addition to the /etc/rc.conf.local file of:
sndiod_flags=-m play
Fixed the issue. After adding the above, don’t forget to /etc/rc.d/sndiod restart so the flags take effect.
Some suggestions were to disable sndiod – which does work – but the OpenBSD developers advise against this and still recommend the above flag.