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

Soryn79

I know this is an old topic but since it's still relevant, I figured I would post this.

I went with the original method listed here as I saw that before I found out about the v2.0... I had a video splash screen and I noticed that the autostart.sh files addressed this wrong. Using the way it was posted originally, after the video, it kicks back to the pi boot screen for 1 second (sleep 1) and then starts ES. This stops people who want the video to pass the ES loading screen as it forces ES to wait until after the 1 second sleep after the video ends to start ES.

I recommend changing:

while pgrep omxplayer >/dev/null; do sleep 1; done
(sleep 10; mpg123 -Z /home/pi/bgm/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) &
emulationstation #auto

to this: (the --no-splash is optional)

emulationstation --no-splash &
while pgrep omxplayer >/dev/null; do sleep 1; done
(mpg123 -Z /home/pi/bgm/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) #auto

Changing it so that it starts after ES loads just makes more sense to me. This makes sure that the music will always start 1 second after the video ends regardless of video length.

jose__macedo

I turn on my retropie and no music are played. Once I enter the command line with F4, the music starts and even I exit back to ES, it continues playing. Why it's not initializing automatically when I boot the system? Any help?

mitu

@jose__macedo How did you configure the music start-up ?

jh56666

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

I hope this helps some of you out and if there's any questions, please feel free to ask! Also, if there's any suggestions in how to tidy this guide up, please let me know as well.

Looks great but how does one turn it off, you ask?

MeanJoeA

Configuration for playing .ogg files
@Naprosnia thanks for the great install script. Made my noob life easy.
I couldn't get my system to play ogg files in the music folder.
I edited bgm_system.sh and added ogg to the mp3file type list (line 77). Next I reloaded music and ... SUCCESS!

Does anyone else have issues playing .ogg files?
Is this the correct fix? (or just a workaround for something wonky in my system?)

agboju_logun

Another thumbs up for @Naprosnia's solution.

I've recently rebuilt my 3b+ from scratch and I had a bit of bother getting the fade in/out function working when launching/quitting games.

After a bit of trial and error, I got it working by amending the CHANNEL variable in bgm_system.sh from "PCM" to "HDMI":

#ALSA related vars
readonly CHANNEL="HDMI"

All working nicely now :)

Codafire

@maplestory i dont know why but this works perfect in my rasp3 but in the rasp4 i follow the same guide but always start with the same song. any way to make a random music selection at start?

ICYBAWSS

when i do sudo nano /home/pi/.bashrc, retropie_welcome does not show up. im using a pi 4 btw

Logiurser09

i have no idea where to put my mp3 file

luckyluca

This post is deleted!

luckyluca

@Soryn79 said in Quick and easy guide for adding music to Emulatonstation on RetroPie. Noob friendly!:

I recommend changing:
while pgrep omxplayer >/dev/null; do sleep 1; done
(sleep 10; mpg123 -Z /home/pi/bgm/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) &
emulationstation #auto
to this: (the --no-splash is optional)
emulationstation --no-splash &
while pgrep omxplayer >/dev/null; do sleep 1; done
(mpg123 -Z /home/pi/bgm/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) #auto
Changing it so that it starts after ES loads just makes more sense to me. This makes sure that the music will always start 1 second after the video ends regardless of video length.

Hi there, I tried your version and whilst it works beatifully on startup, it breaks emulationstation when pressing F4, it just hangs on a blank screen.

I thought I'd let you know.

Any ideas?

Best!
Luca