Is There a Way to Emulate Louder?

AlphaBetaPie

I find that the average level of my game playvideos in my emulationstation theme all play at around the same volume level. But when the emulation starts, the game sound is significantly lower (to where I have to turn it up). Then when I back out, because I just turned the sound up on my speakers while playing, the gameplay footage is blaring in the theme. So I have to turn it back down. Up, down, up, down is what I do most times I play. Is there a setting in Retroarch that will allow me to raise audio levels of emulation globally? Or would it be easier to just lower the emulationstation sound setting lower in the menu (which I assume will affect everything globally as well)?

brandflake11

A quick fix could be to adjust retroarch's sound gain settings:

Settings>Audio>Volume Gain (dB)

Adjust it by about 9dB (double the perceived loudness)

Then, save your retroarch settings. Make sure to adjust the overall alsa output of the pi's soundcard down, or you could experience clipping. You might still experience clipping with this method and even with your soundcard's settings depending on how retroarch handles sound.

Of course, maybe a better solution would be to adjust the alsa output of the soundcard you are using before going into a game with something like this:

amixer -c 0 set Master 9dB+

and when leaving a game:

amixer -c 0 set Master 9dB-

Replace 'Master' with the soundcard you want to change.

Is there a way to do this with retropie maybe? Like, does retropie have a place where you can run a command before running a game, and after leaving a game? That's the piece of the puzzle that I don't know.

I hope this helps!

AlphaBetaPie

@brandflake11 Thanks a lot man! Very detailed and good advice. I will play with these settings and see what I come up with. Much appreciated!

brandflake11

@alphabetapie Sure thing! One other thing that I left out is the -c option for amixer refers to the soundcard number, so you may have to change 0 to a number that refers to your soundcard.

I had some time to play with the amixer commands on the pi4. I had success with these commands:

amixer -c 1 set Headphone 6dB+

amixer -c 0 set HDMI 6dB+

Interestingly, for the pi4, the headphones out simple control is name Headphone (singular).

If you're not on a pi, list your soundcards with this:

aplay -l

AlphaBetaPie

I just wanted to follow up on this post. The above method seems like it would work as a global option, but would also affect other rom games that have normal sound levels as well. I was wondering if it's possible to make this a per-game thing, where I could just manually raise each games level by a few db in a config file so they better match the rest?

brandflake11

@alphabetapie As of the current retroarch version, I don't think you can set the audio output gain per game (correct me if I'm wrong!). It's a system setting. I think the first step would be to find out if you can load different system settings depending on what game you launch.

If that doesn't work, you could do it with this step (although I don't know how retropie manages retroarch.cfg since they have their own scripts that modify settings):
You could implement a script using sed to change the
audio_volume in ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg before launching the game from retroarch. Maybe there would be a way to do this in the menu before retroarch is launched with retropie. Changing the audio_volume in retroarch.cfg would be trivial with sed, it would just be a matter of figuring out how to change it depending on what game you would want.

AlphaBetaPie

@brandflake11 said in Is There a Way to Emulate Louder?:

@alphabetapie As of the current retroarch version, I don't think you can set the audio output gain per game (correct me if I'm wrong!). It's a system setting. I think the first step would be to find out if you can load different system settings depending on what game you launch.

If that doesn't work, you could do it with this step (although I don't know how retropie manages retroarch.cfg since they have their own scripts that modify settings):
You could implement a script using sed to change the
audio_volume in ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg before launching the game from retroarch. Maybe there would be a way to do this in the menu before retroarch is launched with retropie. Changing the audio_volume in retroarch.cfg would be trivial with sed, it would just be a matter of figuring out how to change it depending on what game you would want.

Thanks for all the helpful info and trying to assist. I guess the best I can do at the moment is to just adjust the audio volume in the arcade game's dipswitches for now and see if it persists. It is what the arcade owners would have had to do back in the day using that method.