aplay on Raspberry Pi 4 freezing

[cradcore]

• I'm running a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
• With version 21.2.2 of the Mycroft software
• With the standard Wake Word

Hi, I got mycroft set up on a Raspberry Pi using a Respeaker 6 mic array and an externally powered speaker. I installed the necessary drivers for the microphone hat, and I used the Picroft scripts to install Mycroft. Although I am not using the provided image, I followed the exact steps documented in the recipe

It works well for anywhere from 5-10 minutes before it completely stops working. Mycroft then no longer recognizes any mic input, nor does it play anything from the speaker. As I investigated, I found that it always happens as Mycroft is playing something back to me. After looking at the running processes after it froze, I found a line like this:

aplay -Dac101 /tmp/mycroft/cache/tts/Mimic2/f9776f93ac975cd47b598e34d9242d18.wav

Now, this command never completes, and completely locks up the mic array (which the speaker is plugged into). My first thought was this is an issue with the microphone array or speaker that I have, but I’ve never been able to reproduce this issue outside of Mycroft, and have manually played the above wav file and others several dozen times to try and get it to freeze. aplay only seems to freeze when it is called by Mycroft. Going in and killing the process does fix the issue, and Mycroft starts working as expected again. But again this happens after 5 or 10 minutes of use, every time.

Am I missing something to fix this? Is there a way to add a timeout or something similar? Thanks

[g3holliday]

I have the same problem, but with 3.5mm and USB headphones, and it doesn't play at all.