@yewox50273 no, alsathread has always (at least, for longer than this issue) been used for pi3, which is why i was clarifying what @nesfredo was using. the change you refer to only made it the default on pi4.
it didn’t cause the skipping issue on pi3 in years past, so clearly alsathread/RA has had some kind of change causing the issue. we should bisect this to a specific retroarch commit (version is not specific enough) to find the culprit, but it would be tricky to do so since the issue seems to occur after a game has been running a while and is sometimes hard to spot.