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

Brigane

@zerojay yeah perhaps, but how will I know :)

zerojay

...By changing the audio device selected?

Yuu

I've had it set on either Auto or 3.5, same result; if the background music is enabled, there will be no ingame music. I need to test this with HDMI.
Edit: Tested with HDMI w/ HDMI Sound. This only effects the 3.5 jack output; HDMI with sound going to TV works fine.

Brigane

@yuu thank you for clarifying that. Now, if only we knew how to make it work with 3.5mm or a USB sound card for that matter.

mitu

@brigane As you noticed earlier, it could be because the 3.5 jack output is not able to play 2 simultaneous audio streams. The solution for this would be to use Dmix (https://alsa.opensrc.org/Dmix) or PulseAudio to do the sound mixing for such configurations.

Brigane

@mitu thanks for the link. I would like to try and fix it, but I'm not quite sure how to do it. Linux isn't my strong side.

steve51184

Hi I'm stuck on step 2 and 4..

step 2 causes this error on boot:

https://i.imgur.com/TD896Nk.jpg

The command must be outdated or something I dunno I copied it perfectly

And step 4 there is no retropie_welcome but above # RETROPIE PROFILE END in the /home/pi/.bashrc not at the end or anywhere?

Would love any help

zerojay

@steve51184 said in Quick and easy guide for adding music to Emulatonstation on RetroPie. Noob friendly!:

Hi I'm stuck on step 2 and 4..

step 2 causes this error on boot:

https://i.imgur.com/TD896Nk.jpg

The command must be outdated or something I dunno I copied it perfectly

And step 4 there is no retropie_welcome but above # RETROPIE PROFILE END in the /home/pi/.bashrc not at the end or anywhere?

Would love any help

For step 2, it's not all meant to be on the same line. Everything after done needs to be on a second line.

steve51184

@zerojay
Fixed both errors I should've updated the post ty though.. Any ideas in this: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/159736

Hyuma

this is awesome! @MapleStory there is a way to load playlist using some combo with joystick and buttons? I would like to have my playlist loaded only whit a combo or similar.. thanks!

almulder

@vj88 said in Quick and easy guide for adding music to Emulatonstation on RetroPie. Noob friendly!:

Hi everyone!!!
I have a problem with this... splash screen won't play over e.s. loading screen! Emulation always starts at splash screen end. I know that the problem is this method cause it doesn't wait without it!
Any help please?
Ps sorry for bad english
Thanks.

Has anyone figured this out? Is there a way to just start the audio even if the splash screen is still playing? I want BG music, but I also want the splash to play over the es logo.

almulder

Ok I found a solution, needed to remove the fist line as that is a wait for the video to stop before it starts the next line. (Removed this line)

while pgrep omxplayer >/dev/null; do sleep 1; done

so in your autostart.sh have it look like this

(sleep 10; mpg123 -Z /home/pi/RetroPie/backgroundmusic/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) & emulationstation #auto

sleep controls the pause before it loads the music, so you can use that to make it so the music does not overlap with your video audio. The items inside the ( ) are done in the background so sleep has no effect on emulationstation starting.

.
Now here is what was odd. if you have --no-splash (See below) that would not work. I removed it so it would show splash and now my video plays over the top of it. I made the video long enough so I dont see the splash form ES and the music starts to play in the background about 3 seconds before my video finishes.

(sleep 10; mpg123 -Z /home/pi/RetroPie/backgroundmusic/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) & emulationstation --no-splash #auto

Hope this helps others!

lokize

it would be nice if the retropie had the option to put sounds when selecting the system in the menu, as for example when choosing the snes played a super mario bgm, just as the recalbox has that option, I hope that in the future the retropie team think about this!

prog-amateur

Hello, I try to get it working on my PC (Ubuntu 18.04) without success. Of course, I have replaced every /pi/ with /user/ because Retropie in Ubuntu doesn't have no /pi/ folder.

Another thing which is strange is that I don't have omxplayer because it is not compatible with x86 CPUs. So shall I remove the line related to it ?

I am sure, it is a matter of adjustment but I can't know what. I really would like to implement it, so please, feel free to help me.

Thank you very much !

cyperghost

@prog-amateur Try replacing every /home/user with $HOME. This is a more general way

prog-amateur

Thank you very much for your help. It didn't worked. I have applied it to

autostart.sh : (sleep 10; mpg123 -Z $HOME/bgm/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) &
.bashrc : sudo nano $HOME/.bashrc
and the music folder : mkdir $HOME/bgm

By the way, something that I had to adjust was :

to remove the following line in autostart.sh because omxplayer is only compatible with ARM CPUs, not with x86 CPUs (so I was affraid about any error code) :
while pgrep omxplayer >/dev/null; do sleep 1; done
in .bashrc, there was nothing called neither retropie_welcome nor # RETROPIE PROFILE END, so I have just pasted [[ $(tty) == "/dev/tty1" ]] && pkill mpg123 at the end of the document.

Maybe I did something wrong ? I am sure it is a matter of small code, please feel free to help me (and other people as I have also seen my request asked by others but never answered). I am sure it can help, thank you so much for your kind help.

cyperghost

Added fadein/fadeout feature for mpg123. You can read this thread for setup. I've tested the script for a few weeks and it seems to be stable.

So instead of adding the pkill -CONT or -STOP mpg123 command to runcommand-onend.sh or runcommand-onstart.sh you add

runcommand-onstart.sh --> $HOME/scripts/BGM_vol_fade.sh -STOP
runcommand-onend.sh--> (sleep 2 && $HOME/scripts/BGM_vol_fade.sh -CONT) &

If you don't use -STOP and -CONT switches then the script will toggle status itself. This will work in 99.99% of all cases to get 100% hitrate then use the force.

birthmarkered

Hi, thanks for this! running great as expected. However is there a way I can hide the boot text?

I already did this: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/14299/tutorial-remove-boot-text-on-the-raspberry-pi-for-noobs

But after installing the background music, there is a little boot text reappearing + the emulation station splash (which I also want to hide)

If I can hide that my retropie is perfect!

Emerikant

Just curious if anything has changed regarding whether it's possible to have different music per console screen? ie. Song 1 plays in ES, song 2 plays in Mame, song 3 plays in Nes, song 4 plays in Snes and so on and so on.

cyperghost

@Emerikant no this is not possible. If you want this feature you can use Recalbox or Batocera - there it is present. It is a part of Emulation Station and has barely nothing to do with the topic here.