News - Valve launches Steam Music Beta, reveals service features

[=assassin=]

Sounds like a good feature, it's not like it's asking you to just to buy music off Steam, you're just making use of your existing collection without having to alt-tab out, like has been mentioned.

[azrael-]

It's Chrome.

Does anyone actually know WHICH version though? In 2012 it was supposedly Chromium 6 (though the main branch was already up to 19), then as of Nov 2013 (the last post in the same thread) Steam (apparently) was at V19, though we're already up to 32 on the main branch.

And then I just checked the in-game overlay's user agent, and it reports as 18 instead of 19, so clearly we're still a bit behind.

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; Valve Steam GameOverlay/1391473118; ) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19"

If it were any reasonably recent version of Chrome/Chromium wouldn't the engine be listed as Blink instead of WebKit?

[tealsuki]

If it were any reasonably recent version of Chrome/Chromium wouldn't the engine be listed as Blink instead of WebKit?

Good eye, I didn't even know they'd made a switch, Chrome 33 doesn't report as Blink though under the User Agent, I guess they're still too similar to warrant it.

[azrael-]

Good eye, I didn't even know they'd made a switch, Chrome 33 doesn't report as Blink though under the User Agent, I guess they're still too similar to warrant it.

Apparently, Google was fed up having to maintain a lot of Apple-related code in WebKit, so they forked it, weeded out unnecessary code and called it Blink. It's been the rendering engine in Chrome/Chromium since v28. I wonder why it isn't listed in the user agent string, though.

[Saracen]

Well the point is that you can easily control what music is playing without alt-tabbing out (which can cause some games to freak out) or if using big picture mode you can change tracks using the controller.

Seems like a smart move but unless they get it working with Spotify I'm not interested.

Well, cynical ol' me wonders if this is about offering mysic control from within Steam, or about building a base to try to leverage a music sales service, if the Spotify type, kind-of like MS trying to leverage phone and tablet sales by ramming MUI down Win8 user's throats?

Personally, though, not interested. I don't use Steam, so if it's in-Steam player control, not interested in the slightest, and if it's the latter scenario, I'm even less interested.

[jim]

If I want to listen to music whilst I game, then I run the game windowed and use a tried and tested piece of music library software.

I don't use the Steam overlay at all, for anything.

So between the two issues, not remotely interested.