Thanks for making gret project - this looks very promissing and better suits my needs than other projects except I cannot get sound working.
My issue basically the same as described above: when booting to emulationstation the sound is muted and changes are not being saved.
I have tryied a lot of things:
1) Messing with ALSA settings. The only way I can get sound working is by quitting ES (F4), switching TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F2?) and logging in as root, then typing "aplay -l" to find out my sound card name "PCH", then initiating it by typing "alsacfg init PCH", then returning to ES by typing "startx". After that I can change sound device to Analog from ES and raise the volume - then it works, but is not persistent on reboot.
2) I think the problem might be that filesystem is corrupted on the first boot. There is an error telling something about partition alignment and compromised performance. I have tryied different USB sticks and SD cards both flashing with "dd" and Etcher, booting from EFI and Legacy boot on two different laptops, but still no sound. Also retroarch hotkey settings are not being stored.