Quick and easy guide for adding music to Emulatonstation on RetroPie. Noob friendly!

Brigane

I have a problem getting both mp3 and video snaps playing at the same time. Also the in-game sound is gone.
I think the reason is that the audio source is busy playing the audio (mp3) and it can not handle the video snaps and mp3 files simultaneously for some reason.

This also happens when I use your image @dmmarti (Motion Blue V5) with the included background music script. Do you have an idea what I can do?

I'm using a USB Sound Card such as this one https://www.ebay.com/itm/PC-Win7-Mac-Vista-H1-3D-Virtual-Audio-Sound-Card-Adapter-USB-2-0-7-1-Channel-/152624039538

Any thoughts?
Any help or thoughts are much appreciated.

westleigh77

@tmntturtlguy I had the same thought. It's been a year, thought I'd check in to see if anyone's come up with a solution

edwardthehuman

installed this succesfully, but it mutes the game music/sounds entirely when i enter it. any solution?

Brigane

@edwardthehuman

This is kind of the same problem I'm having. Do you use a USB sound card or just HDMI?

Yuu

@brigane I am facing a similar issue. If I have the background music enabled, all in-game sounds don't work. If disabled, no problems. I am using the 3.5 jack to get sound out. Was there ever a solution?

Brigane

@yuu not that I know of. I thought this would occur to other people as well but that doesn't seem to be the case.

zerojay

Perhaps something caused by the audio device selected?

Brigane

@zerojay yeah perhaps, but how will I know :)

zerojay

...By changing the audio device selected?

Yuu

I've had it set on either Auto or 3.5, same result; if the background music is enabled, there will be no ingame music. I need to test this with HDMI.
Edit: Tested with HDMI w/ HDMI Sound. This only effects the 3.5 jack output; HDMI with sound going to TV works fine.

Brigane

@yuu thank you for clarifying that. Now, if only we knew how to make it work with 3.5mm or a USB sound card for that matter.

mitu

@brigane As you noticed earlier, it could be because the 3.5 jack output is not able to play 2 simultaneous audio streams. The solution for this would be to use Dmix (https://alsa.opensrc.org/Dmix) or PulseAudio to do the sound mixing for such configurations.

Brigane

@mitu thanks for the link. I would like to try and fix it, but I'm not quite sure how to do it. Linux isn't my strong side.

steve51184

Hi I'm stuck on step 2 and 4..

step 2 causes this error on boot:

https://i.imgur.com/TD896Nk.jpg

The command must be outdated or something I dunno I copied it perfectly

And step 4 there is no retropie_welcome but above # RETROPIE PROFILE END in the /home/pi/.bashrc not at the end or anywhere?

Would love any help

zerojay

@steve51184 said in Quick and easy guide for adding music to Emulatonstation on RetroPie. Noob friendly!:

Hi I'm stuck on step 2 and 4..

step 2 causes this error on boot:

https://i.imgur.com/TD896Nk.jpg

The command must be outdated or something I dunno I copied it perfectly

And step 4 there is no retropie_welcome but above # RETROPIE PROFILE END in the /home/pi/.bashrc not at the end or anywhere?

Would love any help

For step 2, it's not all meant to be on the same line. Everything after done needs to be on a second line.

steve51184

@zerojay
Fixed both errors I should've updated the post ty though.. Any ideas in this: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/159736

Hyuma

this is awesome! @MapleStory there is a way to load playlist using some combo with joystick and buttons? I would like to have my playlist loaded only whit a combo or similar.. thanks!

almulder

@vj88 said in Quick and easy guide for adding music to Emulatonstation on RetroPie. Noob friendly!:

Hi everyone!!!
I have a problem with this... splash screen won't play over e.s. loading screen! Emulation always starts at splash screen end. I know that the problem is this method cause it doesn't wait without it!
Any help please?
Ps sorry for bad english
Thanks.

Has anyone figured this out? Is there a way to just start the audio even if the splash screen is still playing? I want BG music, but I also want the splash to play over the es logo.

almulder

Ok I found a solution, needed to remove the fist line as that is a wait for the video to stop before it starts the next line. (Removed this line)

while pgrep omxplayer >/dev/null; do sleep 1; done

so in your autostart.sh have it look like this

(sleep 10; mpg123 -Z /home/pi/RetroPie/backgroundmusic/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) & emulationstation #auto

sleep controls the pause before it loads the music, so you can use that to make it so the music does not overlap with your video audio. The items inside the ( ) are done in the background so sleep has no effect on emulationstation starting.

.
Now here is what was odd. if you have --no-splash (See below) that would not work. I removed it so it would show splash and now my video plays over the top of it. I made the video long enough so I dont see the splash form ES and the music starts to play in the background about 3 seconds before my video finishes.

(sleep 10; mpg123 -Z /home/pi/RetroPie/backgroundmusic/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) & emulationstation --no-splash #auto

Hope this helps others!

lokize

it would be nice if the retropie had the option to put sounds when selecting the system in the menu, as for example when choosing the snes played a super mario bgm, just as the recalbox has that option, I hope that in the future the retropie team think about this!