[PD] alsa crashing on recent Pi OS

[Yann Seznec]

Hi again,

I’m wondering if anyone else is having the same issue as me. I’m trying to run Pd patches on Raspberry Pi, and I (perhaps naively) thought that I would use the latest Pi OS. 

I seem to be having far more issues than I had in the past, namely with alsa crashing. It seems like virtually any patch I run will sooner or later crash and print hundreds of lines of this error: 
restart alsa output
alsa xrun recovery apparently failed

Someone on the Pd Forums <https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/14536/alsa-crashing-on-pi/7> suggested that this could be an issue with the latest Pi OS switching to PipeWire, which seems to make some sense. But before I attempt any fixes, I wanted to see if anyone else was running into this problem or might have some suggestions.

Alternatively, can anyone suggest to me a version of the raspberry pi operating system that works well for Pd? Perhaps it will be easiest for me to track down an old OS image and just stick to that.

Here are a few more details of what I’m trying, which is ending up with this issue:

- Using both a Raspberry Pi 3 and 4
- Installing the latest Pi OS using the official Pi imager. I believe this was slightly different versions for the Pi 3 and Pi 4, but the end result was the same anyway. 
- I am using the “lite” version so it’s all command line.
- installing Pd from the repo (apt-get install puredata). I am not certain what version this is…I think 0.50?
- Trying to run a small granular patch like this <https://github.com/yannseznec/humanCall> or a sampler/looper patch like this <https://github.com/yannseznec/soundDestroyer> 
- I have tried running with a higher block size (up to 1024) thinking that maybe the patches were too intense. This didn’t seem to help. 
- This is perhaps unrelated, but I did notice that I needed to specify the audio output in the command I’m using to launch the patch. I’m pretty certain this wasn’t necessary in patches I have run on a Pi before. 

I always get the errors described above. I recognise that this is somewhat anecdotal, but I am really certain that I was able to run much more complicated patches on a Pi several years ago without issue, so this all feels very new to me.

Many thanks,

Yann
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