CD player, tape deck and turntable

Alongside the video hardware there is audio hardware: a CD player, a cassette deck and, new in v0.5.0, a record player — all three take your own music files.

Getting music in

Put audio files into the music/ folder:

Windows — %USERPROFILE%\retroxr\music
Linux / macOS — ~/retroxr/music
Quest — /sdcard/Android/data/com.xenu.retroxr/files/music

Playing something

Spawn a CD player, a cassette deck or a record player from SPAWN → Objects, along with a pair of speakers. Wire the deck to the speakers with a 3.5 mm lead, put a disc or a cassette in, and press play.

Both decks have the transport buttons you would expect. The CD player can skip tracks; the cassette deck cannot, because a cassette could not — you rewind and fast-forward and listen for the gap.

The TV remote drives them from across the room.

The record player

The turntable is the odd one out, and deliberately so: it has no transport row to press. You work it by hand, the way you work a real one.

Drop a record onto the platter, then take hold of the tonearm and swing it over. The arm is the control — parked on its rest, the record is loose and liftable; cued over the band, the deck is committed and the needle is down. Where you set it down across the record is where in the album you start, so dropping the needle two thirds of the way in starts you two thirds of the way in.

There is no fast-forward or rewind, because a turntable has neither. Those two cells are greyed out on the TV remote for this deck. START and STOP drive the platter, and it spins up and coasts down rather than snapping between still and turning.

33 and 45

The speed switch is real, and so is getting it wrong. Every record here is a 12“ LP cut at 33⅓, so playing one at 45 runs it about a third fast and a fifth higher — the whole point of the control. Flip it back and it settles.

Touch the record

Put a fingertip on the spinning record and you drag it. The pitch follows the platter, so slowing it down bends the note down, letting go lets it glide back up to speed, and stopping it dead stops the sound — which is what a record halted under your hand does.

Sound placement

Audio is positioned in the room, so a deck playing across from you sounds like it is across from you. On Quest this goes through Meta’s XR Audio SDK, which renders it with HRTF — the reason you can point at a sound with your eyes closed. Where that is unavailable, RetroXR falls back to Godot’s own 3D audio.