Is there no interest in having retropie run as a service on top of a full desktop environment?

Not on the Raspberry Pi.
RetroPie (ES + emulators) works fine on a PC platform from the desktop, but the audio configuration is handled by the system/desktop environment and there's not much that RetroPie configures at this point, it just used the default audio device that's register in the system (i.e. in PipeWire/PulseAudio).

EDIT: as explained before, you need to find the right Audio Card setting which works for you. Try using PCM/Master instead of HDMI, it should work.

@abj Thanks. This fixed the audio for me.
On my unsupported pi5 setup, switching to the Pegasus frontend killed the audio, and switching back to ES was not fixing it.

For anyone with a Raspberry Pi 4 that wants the default config file this is what you need:
..

This is not the default config.txt file, since the default doesn't have any picade overlay added or any rotate options (which is not supported on a Pi4 anyway). If you're looking for the default file, it can be extracted from the RetroPie image using 7Zip or by just mounting the .img file.

@mitu Yep, that was it. If I leave the ES audio settings at "Default / HDMI", when I change the Audio in RetroArch to "Headphone", then I can get audio from the 3.5mm port.

Very counter-intuitive, but at least it is working now. Thanks for the assist!

@louf
This happens to me when I route my audio signals from the Pi through my home theater receiver and then into the TV. You are spot on in calling it an 'audio-screensaver' as that seems to trigger it when absolutely no audio signal is detected for a second or two.

Side effect of using fancy electronics on audio I suppose. If the device "conditioning" your audio signals doesn't have a setting to disable this behavior then you are stuck with it acting this way. There isn't really anything that ES, RetroPie, or RetroArch can do to fix this since it occurs within the audio conditioning device itself.

On the plus side, this normally doesn't occur too much in games while actually playing. Only when going into/out of games from ES or at loading screens, etc.

Read my previous reply.

@blkhwks19 Got my sound back! Did a whole bunch of reserach and checked into some config.txt options and tried adding:

hdmi_drive=2

... and it seems to work now! Tried in my other tvs and back in this one and everything seems to work. Figured I'd report in case anyone else has spent the time and effort following my long attempt at fixing this =]

glad you got it sorted all roads lead to rome the easiest solution always works best!

The game mode help. 4 tvs in my house and only 1 works with it.

@mitu Thank you. I sorted it. I changed the TV itself to "external speaker" only and the Pi to hdmi. It seems to work fine now. I get no audio at all when I choose "3.5" or "auto".

@oldspicy said in SOLVED - Audio output switching with toggle switch:

How do I mark the post as solved?

Edit the topic starting post and modify the title - append or prepend [solved] to it.

Thanks for answering, check that other users had the same problem, so check my settings thoroughly:
thanks to this help guide:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Sound-Issues/
This step solved the problem for me:

USING THE BUILT-IN HDMI AUDIO
If you have a standard RPi and want to send audio over the HDMI connector then it should just work. In some instances though, you will need to manually modify the raspberry pi boot config file (sudo nano/boot/config.txt) and ADD the following lines to those already there:

# forces HDMI mode hdmi_drive=2 # Setting hdmi_force_hotplug to 1 pretends that the HDMI hotplug signal is asserted, so it appears that a HDMI display is attached. In other words, HDMI output mode will be used, even if no HDMI monitor is detected. hdmi_force_hotplug=1 # Pretends all audio formats are supported by display, allowing passthrough of DTS/AC even when not reported as supported. # May not be needed for all HDMI devices hdmi_force_edid_audio=1

Once you've made the change, save the file, restart your Raspberry Pi, and move onto Step 2.

Hi.
I followed this tutorial's steps and managed to get my BT speaker working.
The problem was that after reboot, the speaker failed to connect.
After searching the web for a while, I ran across this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/334386/how-to-set-up-automatic-connection-of-bluetooth-headset
Please see the proposed solution.
Best regards, Luís

@webodan I don't think ES reads the list of Audio cards present in the system - the choices you see now are the default choices.
Try using the instruction from the USB Audio FAQ page.