Music UI on Retropie -

[millsusaf]

I appreciate so much what you all have accomplished and the hard work I know has to have went into these projects.

Many of us are building these cabinets with decent sound systems and placing them in man caves/basements/entertainment rooms/etc. I think it would be a great idea if there was a menu choice within ES to listen to music, either local music on storage or via streaming, Amazon Music, IheartRadio, Pandora, etc.

I've looked all over but have not found any info regarding this. Is this possible? Thanks!

[mitu]

@millsusaf Wouldn't Kodi be the right choice for media playing ? You can install it from the RetroPie setup script and have it available in ES.

[zerojay]

I've started thinking about how to implement something along what you're talking about here to control music running in the background on the pi3 (through the mpg123 method) though it looks like we'll have to use something else to give us more fine-grained control. When I do a bit more research, I'll talk about it here but I don't see why this couldn't happen.

[cyperghost]

@zerojay I think a basic control can be done via bash-script. The folder structure would be like

~\BGM\Artist1
~\BGM\Artist2
~\BGM\Artist3

The script would just change the folder that playes music in Background. But for a real implementation to ES I'm the wrong person to ask for.

I've written (or adapted) some small scripts for simpelst music control

1. Toggle Music Player status > this pauses/unpauses/starts mpg123
2. Annother Track

1. Toggle Music Player

#!/bin/bash 
#Toggle MPG123 Music Player to mute/unmute condition
#Simple by checking running PID and sent -STOP or -CONT term
#Is no PID of MPG123 is available it will be launched - by cyperghost


command="mpg123"

pids="$( pgrep "$command" )"

if [[ -z "$pids" ]]; then
    "$command" -Z /media/usb0/BGM/*.mp3 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
    exit 0
fi

for pid in $pids; do
    state="$( ps -ostate= -p "$pid" )"

    stopped=0

    case "$state" in
        *T*)    stopped=1 ;;
    esac

    if (( stopped )); then
        kill -s CONT "$pid" > /dev/null 2>&1
#        printf '"%s" (%d) has been unpaused\n' "$command" "$pid"
    else
        kill -s STOP "$pid" > /dev/null 2>&1
#        printf '"%s" (%d) has been paused\n' "$command" "$pid"
    fi
done

2. Annother Track

#!/bin/bash
#This changes track by killing musicplayer
#and reloading it

pkill mpg123 > /dev/null 2>&1
sleep 1
mpg123 -Z /media/usb0/BGM/*.mp3 > /dev/null 2>&1 &

My opinion about BGM is, it is a track with +45min of length and with ambient sound. For my setup I change the music track in just very rare cases. But of course I would not say "No" if an implenmentation in ES is made via mpg123 backend ;)

[zerojay]

I won't be using mpg123 as it has no real ability to control playback. I have something better in mind.