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Steam Music Now Accepting Beta Signups
dotarray writes "Valve continues in its quest for world domination with the announcement of Steam Music, soon to be a part of SteamOS, Big Picture and — eventually — the desktop Steam client. Promising a way for you to 'Listen to your music collection while you play games', beta signups (of a kind) are open now."
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OP seems to think Valve's aspirations are deplorable for consumers.
The more companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Valve) who vie for control of the modern omni-market, the better it is for us. Someone tell me how more choices is a bad thing.
Valve, you can send me my check in the mail, please.
"With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone."
But what can they bring to the table that old winamp and mp3s can't do better?
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
From the announcement:
With Steam Music, you can now listen to your music collection while playing games. Once you’ve pointed Steam to your local music directory, your Steam Library will include Album and Artist views of your collection.
Sounds like, for now, this is a convenience feature for steam users to access their own music while gaming rather than a distribution method.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
When I first read the headline, I was hoping this was an announcement of a music store. While integrating a music player into the system is interesting, I really hope they do go that far. A lot of people making the move from OS X to Linux find themselves at a loss when it comes to finding a comprehensive music store alternative. If not DRM laden, such a thing could be a huge win in Linux.
Oh well.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
If it is a method of playing custom soundtracks from local music, the announcement doesn't seem to state what formats can be used. Does it support mp3, ogg, m4a, wma, flac, and others (nsf, mod, etc.)?
FCYVV? ukouale?
Please, if you're going to capitalize letters in unexpected ways, at least make them spell out some kind of clever message.
It certainly will not make a dent in the console business though, which a lot of people seem to think.
Of course, that is unless Valve have a RRP of a similar price
Xbox One has AMD graphics and an MSRP of $499. Steambox One also has AMD graphics and an MSRP of $499.
Some flavors of Ubuntu bundle a client for the Amazon MP3 store in countries where it is available. But you're right that I've discovered several songs that are on iTunes but not Amazon.
Steam Music, from Valve's description, is basically just an in-game music player (they already have the Steam Overlay running things in-game, for chat and web browsing). You pick your media folder, it lets you play stuff from it. I see absolutely nothing about selling music via Steam.
And this makes sense. There's many games I would want to play my own music in (Civilization springs to mind), and be able to control it from inside the game. It probably won't be the greatest music player, but much like the Steam Overlay web browser is just a simple WebKit browser that doesn't really compete with Chrome or Firefox as standalone browsers, this doesn't need to compete with whatever passes for a top-notch media player. It just needs to play music from my hard drive, and let me pause/play/change tracks by pressing Shift+Tab and some buttons.
That said, Steam *already* sells music - several games have their soundtracks in the Steam store, usually as a bundle with the game for an extra buck or two. As far as I've seen, they're all DRM-free, just plain MP3 files.
http://goo.gl/YTYeC
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm all for listening to your own music while playing games, but I can do that right now very easily without Steam.
I love to play NFS -style racing games and turn down the game's music and start AIMP3 or Spotify in the background. It's like being a teenager again, driving around listening to my tapes or the radio, except I'm doing it in a Lamborghini Vaneno, running from cops and jumping over rusting airplanes.
When I want to hear my own collection, I've got that, when I want to listen to the "radio" I can open the Hype Machine app in Spotify and hear music curated by any one of hundreds of music blogs.
OK, so Valve wants to offer this all within Steam. Fair enough. More the merrier. But if they really want to do something for me, they can fix it so the songs start at the beginning of a race, they way they do in NFS: Rivals or Most Wanted or Burnout Paradise. I can't do that right now and I would really like that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, at first I thought this was going to be another music service, which I thought would be a bad idea for Valve, but it turns out this is just a minor feature enhancement to the Big Picture mode, and I think it is perfect. Well, maybe not perfect, it needs to support Ogg at the very least, but it's still beta so I can't fault them for it yet.
I read the internet for the articles.
Considering that Steam is also getting into software distribution in general and not just games, could it be that SteamOS has the potential to eventually compete with Windows as a consumer desktop OS? Obviously Valve has made no indication of such intentions, but they are Valve, after all. To quote their own TF2 character: "One shudders to imagine what inhuman thoughts lie behind that mask." Honestly I'm partly fantasizing, but at the very least they intend to take the PC gamer crowd, and that would be a critical blow to the Windows consumer space if they succeed.
I can play my final fantasy music collection while playing final fantasy!
Not directly related to Steam Music, but a simple feature for Grand Theft Auto games would be to have real radio stations (MP3 streamed) as the in-game radio stations.
A lot of music players support global hotkeys which allow you to change track, stop/pause/play/whatever using your keyboard's media keys or if not available, a specific key combination, regardless of whether the player is the focus application or not. Winamp does this and it works well.
Having said that, one thing I hate about Linux is that said global hotkeys do not seem to function in most fullscreen programs (games) due to them taking all input, which also prevents system hotkeys like mute and volume changing. I guess in this case it makes sense for Valve to create a music player to deal with this usability issue.
Yeah, at first I thought this was going to be another music service, which I thought would be a bad idea for Valve
Off the top of my head Valve have said that they're working on video streaming agreements for SteamOS as part of their attempt to move Steam into the living room. If you've got gaming and movie/TV streaming in a box then music streaming would be a fairly logical extension of that.
Whether they had their own service or just piped it in from somewhere else is a different matter, but it wouldn't surprise me to see this expand in a few years time if SteamOS/Steam Boxes go down well.
So basically, it's pointless. I already use foobar2000 to play my music in the background when I play games. It's easily controllable by media keys, global hot keys or from any Android device.
I run a few Xonotic servers and was thinking of promoting CC licensed artist or ones that would allow me to use their music for free in game by changing the in game music on the server once every two weeks, dont want to do it too often as the players have to dl the music serverpackage everytime the music is changed. Then on my site I'd do profiles of the artists and make the music bundles adailable for download.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
They better try to lose some bloatware from their Steam Client. On my Mac mini, it's faster to start fucking Photoshop CS6 then to start Steam.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I've not been VAC'd for having Visual Studio installed for at least a decade... 10 year old account still in good standing.
Let's face it, most people probably use winamp to listen to music even today. When they announced they were getting out of the game, Steam probably thought it was a good time to tap the market so that's what they are doing? But, winamp recently stated that they got purchased by some other company but I'm sure steam could still take over the PC market since most steam users run steam in the bg while doing net stuff so why not have a music player? Hopefully the quality will be good because if you're comparing WMP with winamp, winamp sounds a lot better but will this steam one sound better? Not sure.
Pay attention, will you; this is a feature for SteamOS and Big Picture mode, meaning it's meant for the living room, where you use a controller, not a keyboard.
My sig can beat up your sig.
I have VS 2010 and 2013 installed. Eclipse, Arduino, PhpStorm, WebStorm, and MonoDevelop as well. I don't think an IDE is going to set VAC off. I'm not even going into all the various services, emulators, and editors running either. Other than something deciding to randomly update and steal focus when i'm playing Rust, it has been just perfect. I get lazy sometimes and don't shut everything down : /
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Are you a tech noob or just an idiot? I can use a gamepad to control my media player easily.
As I said, I can control fb2k from any Android device. I could also use a remote control, which is far more likely to be in a living room than a controller.
Valve is entirely run by Jagermonsters?
Suddenly Valve Time makes perfect sense!
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Video Streaming services put you in licensing hell. I really hope Valve isn't too serious about it.
I read the internet for the articles.
Right, because your average console-using fucktard (whom Steambox is really targetted at) has the technical competence to add an IR receiver to their computer, let alone not throw a tantrum and smash their controller when they get killed while they were using their phone to change the audio track, or something of a similarly idiotic nature.
Right, because Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, IDEA, Poke (a tool actually used for hacking game memory), VirtualBox, VMware, various hex editors, and some experimental injected DLLs I've been playing with that actually DO modify the game memory of several single-player Steam games have all NOT triggered VAC in a decade. You're just angry because you actually WERE hacking and got your ass banned.
But apparently their employees have mod points...
ITS BETA PEOPLE. TRY IT OUT.
Then lets here your opinions.
Jeruvy