Background Music [Continued from Help/Support]

[Chad921s]

In the python script, why not just make the player adjust the volume down when it sees omxplayer running (while playing video snaps for example) instead of making it stop or pause the music and then resume every time?

Just have a couple basic configs like "normal volume" and "omx volume" so that people can tweak the settings to their preference. It seems like it would be much more simple, coding-wise, to just have the script look for any instance of omxplayer running and then adjust the music volume to whatever setting is specified. This could be instantaneous and not have to involve the fadeout parameter. Seems like it would run cleaner. I know that for my retropie build, the music player stopping and resuming all the time messes with my system previews (I lose video snaps in the systems and have to restart ES or go into and back out of an emulator to reset everything). EDIT: I was wrong, the stopping and starting wasn't the problem. I removed omx player from the list of emulator names so that it runs continuously even over the video snaps and I'm still having the same problem. Even so, it still seems like a cleaner way to set the player up.

Any skilled coders think they could reconfigure the python script in this way? Leave the emulator part the way it is, but change the omx player stuff to simply "when omx player is running, change the volume to 'x'"?

[fdotg]

Does anyone know how to make the music stop when the screen saver starts? I have my screen saver set to black.

[cyperghost]

@fdotg No... this isn't possible. For VideoScreensaver it is possible with some scripts but not intended to be a good usecase.

[madmodder123]

@chad921s I might give it a shot when I have time.

I made a script that installs a modified version of this script which include overlays here!

[tmak]

@anasazi29 Hi, I am having the same issue, all my emulators work for muting the music, except for PPSSPP. I have checked the music.py script and i see "ppsspp" listed but for some reason its not working. from your comment it sounds like you updated the emulator name in the script to "PPSSPPSDL" and that worked. Can you confirm. Also not being an expert on programming, is the script file case sensitive?
Thanks,

[michel30]

Hello,

I run background music on my retropie raspberry pi 3 and when I start an emulation the music stop.

I am using the py file music.py and the only emulator that does not stop the music is TI-99/4A I add in the music.py " ti99sim-sdl " but it does not stop when I start this emu.

Hopefully somebody could help me why this is.

Thanks,

[zerel]

I'm trying to install this on EmulationStation on Windows, can someone help me or it's only for Linux?

[mitu]

@zerel It's only for Linux.

[joelkolb]

I am running a freshly installed and fully up to date image of RetroPie and when I set up this script the music will not stop when I start a game. I'm using RetroArch for everything and line 25 of my script looks as it should with retroarch listed as the first item in emulatornames. I started over from a clean install once already just to make sure I didn't mess anything up. My gut is telling me it's something in a recent update to RetroPie that's causing this. Can anyone help?

[cyperghost]

@joelkolb I prefer the mpg123 method. The python script uses an internal array to check running instances of an emulator and then stops music. The method above makes use of runcommand-onstart.sh and runcommand-onstop.sh which is more hands on.
If you want fade in and fade out effect on the mpg123 you can use this scripts here.

If you are eager in python coding you can release annother version that will get rid of this "libary" and uses also the runcommand options. That would be a more straight way. It's not a direct answer on your question I know.

[joelkolb]

@cyperghost I had used the mpg123 method previously but I never liked the way the music would stop abruptly when you launched a game so the fade in/out for with Livewire's method was nice. I'm happy to see that you came up with a method to do the fade in/out with mpg123. I will try this right away. Thank you!

[ExarKunIv]

@joelkolb i would recommend the script here

it uses mpg123 and it has fade in and out

[joelkolb]

@ExarKunIv Wow, nice and simple with RetroPie menu controls. This is great. I will give it a try. Thanks!

[cyperghost]

@ExarKunIv Oh yes forget about this. It uses mpg123 for mp3 and the fade feature was taken out from my script with much faster jumps in altering volume level so the fade is a bit messed (imho)

[ExarKunIv]

@cyperghost i never really hear it but i dont have the BGM up that much. so for me its all good :)

[stefano.sudati]

how do i uninstall it?

[mitu]

@stefano-sudati Remove the line that starts it from autostart.sh.

[joethefox]

Hello,

it's working great here, thank you. I have some little modifications to enable fade in/fade out and also added the capability to not turn off the background music while playing but just lowering the volume. It works great with arcade ambience :)

The trick to make a smooth fade effect was to launch mpg123 with zero volume, in remote control mode and with the fifo feature.

There are four scripts involved and one ini file to be created in any path you want. In the scripts we will use the /path/to/ path.
The files are:
emulationstation_music.ini
is the file where we store the desired fade in while not playing games (volume_idle) and the final volume when the fade out occurs during playing the games (volume_game)

volume_idle=40
volume_game=10  # Put 0 to disable background music while playing

mpg123_load.sh

#!/bin/bash
source <(grep = /path/to/emulationstation_music.ini)
echo "LOAD /path/to/music/arcade.mp3" > /tmp/mpg123fif
sleep 1
for ((i=0;i<=$volume_idle;i++))
do
  echo "v $i" > /tmp/mpg123fif
  sleep 0.1
done

mpg123_fadein.sh

#!/bin/bash
source <(grep = /path/to/emulationstation_music.ini)
if [ $volume_game -eq 0 ]
then
  echo "LOAD /path/to/music/arcade.mp3" > /tmp/mpg123fif
  sleep 1 
fi
for ((i=$volume_game;i<=$volume_idle;i++))
do
  echo "v $i" > /tmp/mpg123fif
  sleep 0.1
done

mpg123_fadeout.sh

#!/bin/bash
source <(grep = /path/to/emulationstation_music.ini)
for ((i=$volume_idle;i>=$volume_game;i--))
do
  echo "v $i" > /tmp/mpg123fif
  sleep 0.1
done
if [ $volume_game -eq 0 ]
then
  echo "stop" > /tmp/mpg123fif
fi

mpg123_quit.sh

#!/bin/bash
source <(grep = /path/to/emulationstation_music.ini)
for ((i=$volume_idle;i>=0;i--))
do
  echo "v $i" > /tmp/mpg123fif
  sleep 0.1
done
echo "stop" > /tmp/mpg123fif
echo "quit" > /tmp/mpg123fif

Then I have modified the entry to start mpg123 in autostart.sh with:

/usr/bin/mpg123 -f 0 --remote --fifo /tmp/mpg123fif >/dev/null 2>&1 &
sleep 1
/path/to/mpg123_load.sh &

the file runcommand-onstart.sh in:

/path/to/mpg123_fadeout.sh &

the file runcommand-onend.sh in:

/home/gio/scripts/mpg123_fadein.sh &

and the exit command:

/path/to/mpg123_quit.sh

Now the bad news ;)

• At the moment I haven't figured out how to load music in loop mode with mpg123 when in remote control mode
• I'm using a single mp3 file (about two hours of duration), modifying the scripts to load a playlist shouldn't be an issue.

Of course there is room for improvements. I hope this is useful for you

Joe

[Domiswan]

Hi. A small suggestion about Synack method: as someone mentionned, if you have a splash video it delays the startup of emulationstation, because emulationstation waits for the commands in autostart to execute instead of loading.

A simple way to fix that is to launch the whole set of instructions in the backgroung (instead of mpg123 only). The only thing to do is to add parentheses:

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

No more delay ;)

[AHLONNAE]

@michel30
hello, I'm a noobie.
But I have a question:
Are you saying you have a code that will constantly play a mp3 file and play in the background and will continue to play while you do other things in the background
using pygame?

I got mine to play when i boot up the raspberry pi but, as soon as I do something like start my MAIN.py the mp3 stops playing: and I need it to KEEP PLAYING?
Can you help?
Thank you?