Background music player for the MiSTer menu
Copy bgm.sh to the Scripts folder on your SD card.
Run bgm from the Scripts section of the MiSTer menu.
Copy your .mp3, .ogg, .wav or .vgm files to the newly created music folder on your SD card. You can do this in advance by creating the music folder yourself.
Reboot your MiSTer or re-run bgm.
BGM can be automatically updated with the MiSTer downloader script (and update_all). Add the following text to the downloader.ini file on your SD card:
[bgm]
db_url = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wizzomafizzo/MiSTer_BGM/main/bgm.json'
Once installed, BGM will automatically start on MiSTer boot and randomly play any tracks in the music folder.
BGM will stop playing when a core is launched, and resume playing when you get back to the menu.
Launch bgm from the scripts menu to show the control GUI.
BGM supports playback of .mp3, .ogg, .wav and .vgm/.vgz files. These files can be used interchangeably in any playlist.
Internet radio stations can be played using .pls files. The best way to manage these is by creating a new playlist folder, placing a single .pls file in that folder and playing it via the new playlist. Multiple .pls files can be placed in a playlist (along with any other file), but they'll need to be manually skipped to move onto the next one.
When the BGM service is running, launch the bgm script from the MiSTer Scripts menu to launch the control GUI. This GUI will give you basic playback functions, configuration options and the current playback status.
Changes made in the control GUI will also be written to the bgm.ini file and remembered between MiSTer boots.
Playback types can be configured in the control GUI or in the bgm.ini file.
By default, BGM will play the random playback type, which repeatedly picks a track at random to play.
An alternate playback type called loop can be used, which picks a random track to start, and then plays that same track on repeat until a reboot or core change.
The disabled playback type will stop tracks from playing completely, except for boot sounds.
Music files can be separated into playlists. Create a subfolder in the music directory and fill it with music files, it will now show up in the control GUI as a playlist. Playlists can contain any number and depth of subfolders if you want to organise tracks.
You can switch between playlists in the control GUI. As you switch, the current playlist will also be written to bgm.ini, so it will be started automatically next boot. Boot sounds are also taken from the current playlist.
The none playlist (the default) can be used to only use files from the top level of the music folder. Music files in the top level of the music folder and playlist subfolders will not conflict with each other.
The all playlist will play all files from every folder in the music folder.
Individual music files can be configured to loop a certain number of times. If you have a short piece of background music from a game that you'd like to run longer, you can set it so that when that track starts playing it will loop a certain number of times before continuing to the next track.
You can do this be renaming the music file so it has X##_ in front of the filename where ## is the number of times it should loop with a leading zero. For example: X05_My File.mp3 would loop it 5 times, while X23_My File.mp3 would loop it 23 times.
Marking a music file as a boot sound will make BGM play it once when MiSTer starts up. This is intended for very short sound clips, like what you'd hear when booting up <your favourite console>.
Rename a music file with a _ in front to make BGM play this file first on MiSTer startup (e.g. _My File.mp3). This can be done with multiple files to have it pick a random one each time. Boot sounds are picked from the active playlist and will be excluded from normal play.