[AudioI] Octo inconsistent (usually fails) behavior with arecord | aplay

[Matt Onderlinde]

Hello,

I got the Octo and am trying to pipe the result of arecord to aplay like this:

arecord -f cd - | aplay -

(I've tried numerous other variations of this command...)

This works maybe 5-10% of the time... but even when it works it
eventually fails (with no error messages and in the terminal it
appears like it's still working) and stops playing output. It doesn't
seem to matter what the system load is either on the pi.

arecord -f cd - > /tmp/tmp.wav seems to always work... so something
about piping arecord to aplay doesn't seem to work.

Also, on reboots the card is only recognized about 30% of the time. I
actually bought a 2nd card suspecting the first one might have a
hardware issue but I get the same behavior with the 2nd card.

I can always get it working with this:

sudo modprobe -r snd_soc_audioinjector_octo_soundcard
sudo modprobe -r snd_soc_cs42xx8_i2c
sudo modprobe -r snd_soc_cs42xx8
sudo modprobe snd_soc_cs42xx8
sudo modprobe snd_soc_cs42xx8_i2c
sudo modprobe snd_soc_audioinjector_octo_soundcard

For the ~/.asoundrc I'm just using the out-of-the-box file that comes
with the .deb file from github.

I've also tested in Audacity and see that sometimes the channels
record and sometimes they don't... it's just inconsistent.

My pi is the Raspberry Pi 3 - Model B and I've tried both a 2.5 and 3
amp power supply. I've also tried several Raspbian versions including
the latest Buster release as well as some of the releases from 2017
when the .deb file and this project was really getting going.

My project goal is to record from up to 6 microphones at once and
merge them into a single output channel that goes into a GoPro camera.
So far I can't even get to the merging step since arecord | aplay is
so unreliable.

Any help would be much appreciated!!!

Thanks,

Matt