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

RetroMarty

I followed the original tutorial, all was fine, I started up a game, the music faded out perfectly, but then there was no audio for the game. I am running the latest version of retropie on a raspberry 2.

mitu

@RetroMarty Is your sound working if you don't install the music scripts ? What emulator is started when you have no sound ?

RetroMarty

@mitu Sorry, I was working with a different tutorial, I got this one in and just need help with how to access the file to put in th mp3s

mitu

@RetroMarty You'll need to copy the *.mp3 files into the /home/pi/bgm folder and they'll be played from there.

RetroMarty

@mitu thank you so much, it works perfectly!

liveforeva

@MapleStory I'm having a problem. I've got my mp3s to work but only when I f4 out of emulation station. When i go back into emulation station the music continues but if I shut down or reset my music will not play untill I f4 out of emulation station. Any help would be appreciated thanks.

cyperghost

@liveforeva You likely setted. autostart.sh wrong ... real deal is this setup

(sleep 10; mpg123 -q -Z /home/pi/bgm/*.mp3 < /dev/null) &
emulationstation #auto

Check also if your path, where the music tracks are residing is /home/pi/bgm
I think this will help you in some kind of making bgm for your images work again

Arkz

Didn't work at first but it turns out the filename is case sensitive. Once I changed that it worked fine. Only issue is when I return to emulationstation I want the music to start from the beginning, not resume from where it was. Is there something I can change to make it do this?

cyperghost

@Arkz Instead of -STOP and -CONT use just
pkill mpg123 in runcommand-onstart.sh and
mpg123 -q -Z /home/pi/bgm/*.mp3 < /dev/null & in runcommand-onend.sh

EDITED!

Arkz

@cyperghost Thanks my dood.

Arkz

@cyperghost Hmm. I've entered exactly that (except for the proper filename), it starts fine but when returning to the menu it doesn't start. Just stays quiet. Is there something else I need to change?

cyperghost

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

mpg123 -q -Z /home/pi/bgm/*.mp3 < /dev/null)

Command is wrong..

it's mpg123 -q -Z /home/pi/bgm/*.mp3 < /dev/null &

Arkz

@cyperghost Ah, I thought it might be the parenthesis since there was only one, but I'm not familiar with this language, suppose I should've just tried it. Thanks again bro

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?