Broken pipe when trying to play directly

[dkaszews]

When I copy the example command from demo, I get a broken pipe error:

$ piper-tts --debug -m en_US-lessac-medium -- 'This will play on your speakers.'
DEBUG:__main__:Namespace(model='en_US-lessac-medium', config=None, input_file=None, output_file=None,
 output_dir=None, output_raw=False, speaker=None, length_scale=None, noise_scale=None, noise_w_scale=
None, cuda=False, sentence_silence=0.0, volume=1.0, no_normalize=False, data_dir=['/home/dkaszews/Dow
nloads'], debug=True)
DEBUG:__main__:Checking '/home/dkaszews/Downloads/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx'
DEBUG:__main__:Loading voice: '/home/dkaszews/Downloads/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx'
DEBUG:piper.voice:Guessing voice config path: /home/dkaszews/Downloads/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx.json
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/piper-tts", line 8, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
             ~~~~^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3.13/site-packages/piper/__main__.py", line 213, in main
    player.play(audio_chunk.audio_int16_bytes)
    ~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3.13/site-packages/piper/audio_playback.py", line 52, in play
    self._proc.stdin.write(audio_bytes)
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^
BrokenPipeError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

But if I save it as -f test.wav, then ffplay test.wav works as expected.

[Ifiht]

I ran into this on Arch Linux, my default audio stream was messed up somehow but it worked when I piped to ffplay explicitly. See if my command works for you:
piper-tts --debug -m en_US-lessac-medium --output_raw -- 'This will play on your speakers.' | ffplay -nodisp -autoexit -f s16le -ar 22050 -ch_layout mono -

This is just a workaround, lmk if you find a better fix.

[dkaszews]

I ran into this on Arch Linux

I'm also using Arch BTW, so might be something with the version of ffplay or piper-tts packaged there

[bliminse]

Same happened to me on Debian Trixie... had a look and it seems the -ac flag passed to ffplay is no longer valid (since ffplay v>=7.0) which is what causes the BrokenPipeError.

A PR was already merged with a fix, but there have been no new releases since. You can always apply the same change locally in the meantime :)