[Alsa-devel] Broken pipe mystery

[Pete Barnard]

I am using ALSA 0.9.0rc7 and Red Hat Linux 7.2.  My sound card is a CS461x. My computer is a reasonably powerful beast with 512M of RAM and 1Gig clock speed. I have written a simple capture program which reads interleaved samples from the sound card and goes around in a continuous while(1) loop.  My program works perfectly - until it crashes after several hours with the message: "read from audio interface failed: broken pipe". I have narrowed it down to the following piece of code.  The size of buf is 256 (shorts). Why would the snd_pcm_readi suddenly (randomly?) fail with a broken pipe???  Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I'm struggling with this annoying (and difficult to debug)  problem. Regards, Pete while (1) {     if ((err = snd_pcm_readi(capture_handle,buf,128)) != 128     {         // this is where it fails after several hours of working successfully         cout << "read from audio interface failed: " << snd_strerror(err) << endl;         exit(1);     } }