Quick and easy guide for adding -EMULATED- music to Emulationstation on RetroPie

[MapleStory]

@zerojay

Dude, this is amazing! Something that I've always wished for was the ability to use vgmplay for music, as the source material from consoles and arcade games are usually bite-sized in filesize and lossless in quality. I'll definitely put this to use tonight on my pi.

[adjuntor]

I was cracking my head on why it was not working and realised you forgot to add this to step 5:
sudo chmod a+x /opt/retropie/configs/all/generatem3u.sh

[zerojay]

@adjuntor said in Quick and easy guide for adding -EMULATED- music to Emulationstation on RetroPie:

I was cracking my head on why it was not working and realised you forgot to add this to step 5:
sudo chmod a+x /opt/retropie/configs/all/generatem3u.sh

I made the fix, thank you.

[zerojay]

I'm planning on taking a second run at this. The main change would be that the playlist creation would allow mp3s and all the vgm file types and if it sees an mp3, it will play through mpg123. If it finds a vgm, it'll play with vgmplay. That way, you can have the best of both worlds with one script.

Also, I have an idea of how to do the music fade in/fade out on launch and quit of games so hoping to get that in too.

EDIT: Also fixed a minor coding mistake in generatem3u.sh.

[Eric_McTrainshit]

@zerojay said in Quick and easy guide for adding -EMULATED- music to Emulationstation on RetroPie:

'm planning on taking a second run at this. The main change would be that the playlist creation would allow mp3s and all the vgm file types and if it sees an mp3, it will play through mpg123. If it finds a vgm, it'll play with vgmplay. That way, you can have the best of both worlds with one script.

That'd be nice for a multitude of reasons and would be highly appreciated.

Did you make any progress with that?

[Eric_McTrainshit]

@zerojay I'm guessing that's a no. Hopefully you've been alright. Your activity has been kind of slow in recent months.

[brimby]

I'm getting permissions errors when I try to transfer files to the vgm folder. I tried running

sudo chown -R pi:pi vgm
sudo chown -R 777 vgm

and I still got the same denial afterward

[brimby]

Whoops my issue was that I accidentally did chown instead of chmod for that second line. All good now.

[cyperghost]

@Eric_McTrainshit said in Quick and easy guide for adding -EMULATED- music to Emulationstation on RetroPie:

@zerojay said in Quick and easy guide for adding -EMULATED- music to Emulationstation on RetroPie:

'm planning on taking a second run at this. The main change would be that the playlist creation would allow mp3s and all the vgm file types and if it sees an mp3, it will play through mpg123. If it finds a vgm, it'll play with vgmplay. That way, you can have the best of both worlds with one script.

That'd be nice for a multitude of reasons and would be highly appreciated.

Did you make any progress with that?

Already done here
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/19829/bgm-music-mpg123-with-fade-in-out

[djDarkX]

Sorry for the slight necro, but I just wanted to know if the music playing would be looped or not and if not, is there a way to loop it? I want to make my own background music in SPC format, kind of like SNES Classic, or NSF format, also like NES Classic, where it loops properly.

[Eric_McTrainshit]

@cyperghost That would allow me to play VGM and MP3 files?

[cyperghost]

@Eric_McTrainshit No with this script is is possible to realize fade in and fade out of any music. It has nothing to do with the player or file format itself.
I assumed I wrote that comment because someone asked for feature like the python script for BGM has.

[zerojay]

Yeah, I've been gone awhile but I'm necroing this thread to say that I'm going back to working on my RetroPie-Extras repo and bringing it up to speed with Buster and RetroPie 4.6 and I'm starting with vgmplay. I seem to remember having made a script that allowed both mp3 and vgm to be played depending on the files found in the playlist so I don't think that will be an issue, but we'll see. I have another idea up my sleeve that might be interesting.

EDIT: Everything in this thread still works with RetroPie 4.6 and with lower requirements on the Pi 4. :)

[zerojay]

I've switched the repository for vgmplay to a fork that removes the console UI which was causing breakage in something I was trying.

I will be updating the instructions above soon to match the new vgmplay repository as well as adding support for playing mp3 files through mpg123 in the same playlist as the .vgm and .vgz files.

[ExarKunIv]

@zerojay sweet that you are back. cant wait to see what you do on your RetroPie-Extras.

and i think ill give this BGM a try on my Pi4 once i go back to messing with it

[zerojay]

I've updated the original post with the info for getting mp3 and vgm/vgz into the same playlists for those of you who want to use both.

[zerojay]

Minor fix for generatem3u.sh accidentally erasing the created playlist.

[A Former User]

This post is deleted!

[HellenButterlips]

Thank you @zerojay ! This is tremendous. Very easy to install, and after a minor issue with the vgm directory permissions, was able to get everything up and running....kind of.

Few issues below. Any help would be much appreciated.
*Update Recreating the autostart.sh file fixed issues 1 and 2.

• Both the playmusic.sh and generatem3u.sh scripts are running without issue, but music will not start automatically after boot.
• I can start it by running the playmusic.sh script from the command line (or via ssh), but it only plays through HDMI port. I don't see anyplace in the vgmplay config file to point it to the Headphone output on RPI4.
• The playlist does not loop. Playback terminates after reaching the last item in the m3u file.