No Music in MaLa Interface ?

[walterg74]

Hi all!

Finished my bartop and looking for the best FE to use, since it's a vertical build.. 

So far I think MaLa will be the best choice. I downloaded a layout I found and I sort of liked, but the thing is the "experience" seems a bit bland on startup...

I wanted to at least put some background music on it, but even thous I select it in the config menus, by enabling the music and coosing an mp3 file, when I start MaLa up nothing happens, no music...

Is is because the layout has to support it or am I speaking nonesense?

Can anyone tell me how I should proceed to get some nice background music on startup and as you're scrolling through the gamelists?

Also, if anyone knoes a good choice for a good vertical layout, I'd appreciate if you can point me to it.

Thanks!!

[mike boss]

MaLa will allow you to add a start up video, however I've found that most available online lack.
I wish I had the ability to make a nice intro video, however I dont.
But again, the option exists.

Also in the MaLa layout itself you can add audio effects, I often do for my projects.
A few sites online have arcade related audio effects. It does however take time to set up.

Lastly I do custom layouts should you be interested.

[walterg74]

Hmmm..re-reading my post it sonds pretty confusing as it's not what I wanted to ask..

On one hand about the layojts, just seeing where I can find nice ones, etc.

But my main concern, for posting, was the music issue (independant of layouts). I should have said thatIadd an mp3 but **on the MaLa config optionsto use backgrond music** and that it just doesn't start/play.

Any help on that now that I hope to have explained it better?

Thanks!!

[Vigo]

From my experience, Mala is still pretty buggy with music. I have found that when there is a characters like a - ' % etc, it doesn't seem to play. Try Renaming your mp3s to just the song title with no special characters.

[BadMouth]

I haven't messed around with bg music, but here's the wiki page.
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Mala_JukeBox

I'd try putting the mp3 in the main Mala folder first.

[walterg74]

The mp3 file was already in MaLa's main folder. I did rename it to a simoke name just to be sure, and when I started MaLa it gave an error that it couldnt fine the (previous name) file, so it seems it *was* loading the mp3, however it just wasn't playing.... And with the new shorter/simpler name it still didn't play either! Wtf? 

[BadMouth]

Like I said, I haven't messed around with bg music, but I'm curious now.
I'll fiddle with it this evening and see if I can come up with any insights.

[walterg74]

Awesome, thanks for the help!

Meanwhile I'll try to see if opening up the layout in the editor and adding sound/music works, as I like the layout somewhat like I said befor, but it's just a bland experience with no sound/music 

[BadMouth]

Messed around with it for a bit.  (v.174)
I couldn't get it to work either.
Changed the name and cleared out all the tags, but no luck.
It won't even play the music in the screen where you select the file to play.

 

[BadMouth]

 

Stripped absolutely all info, comments, & album art using mediamonkey and the mp3 now works.

Not sure if it was the album art or the comments (which included a ":" ), but those were the only two things not removed in my previous post.
It just works as expected now.

EDIT: One more note.  After messing with cover and tags, it seems I have to go back to the Sounds and Music tab and play the song before it will automatically play when Mala Launches.

Here is the song I'm testing with if anyone wants to use it in their layout.
(I'd rather hear the video snaps)

[walterg74]

Thanks for testing this! You beat me to the punch though....

As usual, the simplest things are usually the correct ones... I didn't try doing any of that stuff, but i went into the menu and hit "play song" and the. It started working... 

[CpCaveman]

First reply here dont bash me, I can get the music i want to play on the menu screen together with list change sound effects, but when I select a game and it starts the music fades out like it should but the game sounds after a games selected dont work my any ideas?

[tapule]

I didn't try doing any of that stuff, but i went into the menu and hit "play song" and the. It started working

Yes, probably this is a bug. If you disable sounds from layouts and configure a general background song, you must play it after close the Mala dialog.

Greetings.

[Dekieon]

I don't know if you got your problem solved yet or some at this thread is a few months old, but.....

I had this issue too. I couldn't get Mala to play any background music. However when in the Mala settings, where you create the play list for the background music, and clicked the play button, they appeared to play fine.

I spend hours playing with settings and stuff and could get it to work, until I did one very simple thing...

In the play list section, I clicked on a song, then clicked the play button. With the song still playing I exited the settings and then exited Mala. I relaunched Mala and the music started to play.

Every other time I started a song in the play list section while trying to figure this out, I always stopped the song playing before I exited.

I tested this on two computers and they both reacted the same way.
Try it out and let us know if it works.

[Wade007]

By the way, as a loosely related side note, you can get some pretty cool arcade ambient sound samples at this site:
http://arcade.hofle.com

Check out "arcade86.mp3" for example.

This Andy Hofle guy seems to have created some pretty cool mp3's that conceivably could be used as background music to simulate the overlapping sounds and "buzz" of a classic arcade room on the Mala frontend.

After reading this thread, I think I'm going to use Audacity (Mac) to strip any and all ID tags from the mp3s as suggested and then try to run them in the background of the Mala menu system. Could be cool. I'll try it out tonight and hope I don't have any of the troubles mentioned here. Mala does seem to be a bit buggy with music.

[TheDude]

It's a bug in the stable version. I had this problem, too. The sound resetted itself to zero. Switch to the beta version of Mala and it will work fine.

[Wade007]

Last night I tried to load several of above mentioned arcade ambience mp3s into the background but they wouldn't play. I stripped all the ID tags as well. Won't play in the config window and won't play in the background. Furthermore, once it get back to the Mala menu system it won't allow me to use my selected "shift" key to move to other emulator menus. Odd.

I'm using the latest beta. Any thoughts on how to fix this?