play() does not work properly on raspberry pi 5

[dorinclisu]

I can't figure out if the bug is somewhere in sounddevice, or in pulseaudio, portaudio, alsa, rpiOS, rpi5 hardware or my audio USB dongle.

But the naive approach with play_file.py hangs forever on sd.wait() and fails to output audio if the sink is in SUSPENDED state, as inspected with pactl list short sinks.

The strange thing is that play_long_file.py works reliably every time, and afterwards while the sink is still IDLE, the naive play also works. Once it automatically transitions back to SUSPENDED, only play_long_file.py (or paplay <file>) can awaken it.