First revealed earlier in the year, Valve today released Steam Music Player for all users of its desktop client.
All you need to do is point the client towards your music collection and you’re off. Turn it on and you’ll get a little floating media player (which can be activated and controlled in-game), which is able to play albums, mixes and playlists.
It’s not a huge deal for a lot of games, considering the original score is so important to their pace and tone, but for long-running games with lots of downtime (like Civilisation) it’s a god-send.
Steam Music Player [Valve]
Comments
17 responses to “You Can Now Play Your Own Music Through Steam”
WIsh it supported streaming music options like google music & spotify…
This is a brilliant idea, just a shame I use Spotify for nearly all of my music 🙁
Too right, Spotify has effectively stopped me from obtaining music from other means. Best $12 per month spent.
Yeeeeep.
Google music here. I could never go back to any other form of music.
Spotify support would be amazing!
Might you explain to me what Spotify is, My good man?!
Spotify is a music subscription service. Essentially you pay $12 a month to stream millions of songs via any mobile device or browser. Think Netflix for music. There are a few other options available with other providers such as google, rdio, etc.
There is also a free version which is ad supported and not available on mobile devices. You are also limited by skipping tracks and shuffle modes for albums and playlists.
Inmho it is worth it. I buy vynl and use Spotify for everything else. Never looked back.
The open beta was out months ago.
I hope they fixed the interface issues and volume issues.
But will it play FLAC?
I guess this is cool, though I’ve had a multimedia keyboard forever so haven’t ever really had an issue with controlling my music while in a game.
Where this would be really cool is if it were exposed to game devs as part of the Steam API. If you could go through and tag your collection with certain moods and then have appropriate songs spin up in-game it could be fun once you get bored of the original soundtrack.
I pretty much hate all the music in open world games, for example, so if Sleeping Dogs spun up my own collection when I jumped into a car I’d be very happy.
Definitely a great addition for those who like to mix games with their own tunes. I can understand it for games which don’t demand complete immersion or as mentioned those games with a lot of downtime but I for one tend to stick to either the original score/ soundtrack or turning in game music off completely.
badger has a good point in open world games. I like the idea that I could jump into a vehicle and have my own preset stations (playlists) over and above the in game tracks or include music which is tagged for a particular mood or situation. I tend to only listen to the soundtracks of the most recent open world games for the first few hours. After that all music is off.
Kudos on the Bonobo love, Luke
This is awesome. FPS just doesn’t sound right without a swing jazz soundtrack.
This will be good for playing some good post rock albums while playing games! I find some games great with some explosions in the sky going just suits the mood perfectly.
This is great! I loved playing raving games on PC but playing music through Winamp/Windows Media/etc was a pain in the arse.
Now all we need is video, then goodbye XBMC