Mala Background Music Issues

[gemini6920@hotmail.com]

Hi,
Does anyone know how to get Mala to play background music automatically when it starts up? I have done lots of searches and have not found a real answer to this problem. The only way i can get it to play is to use the mouse to enter the menu and go to the music click play and then exit out and go back to the gui.   I am using Mala as a frontend for a mulitcade and the mouse is not accessible.  The system is controlled by joysticks and buttons.
Any tips or ideas?
Thanks

If you need more info on my set up in order to answer this just let me know.

[eds1275]

On my setup I have it set to random, and have a button dedicated to play next song (sorry not sure if that's what it's called in the menu, I'm slacking at work right now and am not near my machine.) If I start it up and it isn't playing, the play next song button will pick a random track and play it.

[mike boss]

Funny, I just designed a jungle themed layout for a customer.
The idea was to have it play GnR "Welcome To the Jungle" upon boot up.
In the MaLa layout editor when I designed the layout I added the song to the menu........ however in MaLa itself the audio would not play.

When Mala was in use, right click to enable the options. There is a sounds/music tab and you can do what you need from there. I got it so now the GnR song plays upon boot up, and fades out upon exit/fades out when select a game.

I got the desired result !

I have a screen shot with the area hi-lited. I'll try to post when I get home.

[mike boss]

Samples

[benarcade]

I had the same trouble as Mike and others. It seems that defining your music in the Layout doesn't work - you have to open MaLa configuration (while running your layout) and set the music/sound events there.

[mike boss]

I often use the Arcade Ambiance Project on builds, and I set it up as shown above.

[gemini6920@hotmail.com]

Thanks for the tips.  I have had it set up like you guys suggested but it would never play for me upon start up unless I used the mouse to access the menu and hit play, and checked the box save position on exit. Then the next time I started mala it would play.

I now got it working after installing a few plug ins (emuwave, mala launcher, and speech) Although I am not sure why any of those would have done anything regarding the background music. I have not configured emuwave to do anything yet, Mala launcher launches a random program I need for another emulator, and the speech is configured but again don't think any of those should have to do with the music.

but either way it is now fixed and working properly.   I am going to install those plug ins on my other set up and see if it fixes it on that one too.     I will report back and let you know if it worked.
Thanks

[Wade007]

Thanks for all those who chimed in on this thread with tips on how to get the background music to work. I had trouble for quite a while with Mala and background music and had just given up. Figured it was a bug that I would just have to wait on to be squashed one day. 

Thanks to Mike Boss' screenshots posted here I was able to get it to work! Thanks Mike!

Follow-up question:
The background music (I use arcade ambient sounds) works great when launching MAME games via Mala, but when I switch to a different emulator like Daphne, Sega M2, Supermodel 3, etc and launch a game there, the background music continues to play along with and over the emulated game and it's sounds. It doesn't fade out and quit when the game is launched. Is there a way to fix this? I assume that it's because I'm launching games from these emulators with AHK or BATCH files. Workaround for this?

Any ideas on how to make the background music fadeout with non-MAME emulated games? Thanks in advance.