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RetroDECK ES-DE Background Music

This experiment was initiated by the users Partack and TopHatCat, then later expanded upon by the RetroDECK Team. The goal was to explore the possibility of running custom scripts that enable very basic music playback in ES-DE.

Note: ES-DE is already working on a built-in Music Player that will arrive in an upcoming update. (And it will likely be more reliable than this experiment)

Disclaimer on Experiments

These experiments are created by the RetroDECK Team and/or Community. The guides are intended for people with technical knowledge and a passion for tinkering. Using these guides might put RetroDECK and your data at risk. The RetroDECK Team can't provide any support for these experiments or fix any issues they might cause on your system or RetroDECK installation.

Information

The scripts supports .mp3, .ogg, .flac and .wav music files.

Prerequisites

  • Manually create the retrodeck/music folder.
  • Enable the Custom Event Scripts in ES-DE: Go to the ES-DE Main Menu → ES-DE Configurations → Other Settings → Enable Custom Event Scripts.

How-to: Play Music

Download the .zip file: retrodeck_music_player.zip containing the four scripts and folders.

(all scripts are licensed under the GPL 3)

music_game_end.sh
music_game_start.sh
music_quit.sh
music_startup.sh

Extract them the .zip file into:

~/.var/app/net.retrodeck.retrodeck/config/ES-DE/scripts/

Open the terminal and run the following command (makes the scripts executable):

chmod +x ~/.var/app/net.retrodeck.retrodeck/config/ES-DE/scripts/**/*.sh

Place your music files into the retrodeck/music folder.

Additional Options

There are some options in the music_startup.sh script (in the startup folder):

MUSIC_DIR="$rdhome/music"
CROSSFADE=true          # true or false
CROSSFADE_DURATION=2    # in seconds
VOLUME=0.2              # from 0.0 to 1.0

Uninstalling the Scripts

  • Disable the Custom Event Scripts in ES-DE: Go to the ES-DE Main Menu → ES-DE Configurations → Other Settings → Enable Custom Event Scripts.
  • Delete the scripts in ~/.var/app/net.retrodeck.retrodeck/config/ES-DE/scripts.
  • Optionally, remove the retrodeck/music folder.