No Audio using Pi5

[RandyR]

While building a new Trixie Desktop image on my Pi5 with HDMI monitor attached I am not getting any audio. I used the latest Trixie image (2025-12-04) and Imager v2.02. I have enabled the kiosk mode and when the web interface shows up there is no sound from PicoChess. If I try to play an sound file using SoX ('play /opt/picochess/talker/voices/en/christina/verygoodmove.ogg') I get:

play FAIL sox: Sorry, there is no default audio device configured

'speaker-test' also fails with:

Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy

raspi-config shows 'no internal audio devices found' but 'aplay -l' gives:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: vc4hdmi0 [vc4-hdmi-0], device 0: MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0 [MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: vc4hdmi1 [vc4-hdmi-1], device 0: MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0 [MAI PCM i2s-hifi-0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

and HDMI is selected on the Desktop speaker icon.

If I disable picochess, obooksrv and gamesdb services and reboot, sound is working when I run the SoX 'play' command. (raspi-config still shows no audio devices).

It seems like PicoChess is locking up the audio.

I'll continue troubleshooting. It could be something with the new RPiOS image (or using X11??).

Randy

[RandyR]

While sound was working I re-enabled the PicoChess services and started PicoChess and no sound with the same SoX error when trying to play a sound. No errors in the picochess.log.

[RandyR]

I built a v3.4 image on the Pi 5 using the 2025-12-04 Trixie Desktop and sound is working so there must be some incompatibility in v4. Note that you can no longer switch to PulseAudio using the latest raspi-config.

Randy

[Johan Sjöblom]

I am pretty sure I located the error. Earlier when I tried to move from sox to python-native sound I had to go back because I did not get the "speed" to work within reasonable time. I will make an effort on that later, but right now I checked and I did not revert everything from that experiment. There was still a pygame.mixer.init() that probably keeps the ALSA open all time. There was no point having that there any more as that would be needed for a python-native sound solution.

PR: https://github.com/JohanSjoblom/picochess/pull/190

Branch to test: 189-trixie-audio

If that branch works then I will merge it immediately... If its difficult to test a branch I can merge it "blindly" as I am pretty convinced this is the reason and its a low risk change.

I have purchased a Pi5 but I have not yet started to build a solution in it.. so I cant test it just yet... Let me know if you want me to merge this into master for easier testing, or whatever test result you might get from branch 189-trixie-audio

BR, Johan