News - Valve launches Steam Music Beta, reveals service features

[HEXUS]

Steam overlay in-game music control and playback feature in the limited beta.

Read more.

[Noxvayl]

Valve clearly have a lot of vested interest in the living room. I hope this doesn't detract from their desktop offering. It is a nice feature, one I would of used in previous years but I now play games without my music on in the back ground so don't feel strongly either way.

If they release a good desktop version that gives me the functionality I like from Winamp without the bloat I deselect during install then I might switch my main music application over for the first time.

[DemonHighwayman]

I'm still waiting for valve to overhaul steam to make it more responsive, steam is by far the slowest program on my PC and I have my suspicions it is just an old version of internet explorer which was re-skinned.

[Noxvayl]

I'm still waiting for valve to overhaul steam to make it more responsive, steam is by far the slowest program on my PC and I have my suspicions it is just an old version of internet explorer which was re-skinned.

In 2010 Valve ditched IE for Webkit to improve their in game browser so I doubt that IE is the cause of the problems. I agree it is slow for an application that is meant to be light on resources but I would imagine the program is their own custom code rather than a re-skinned version of something else.

It is about time they improved its performance though. Perhaps the focus on SteamOS has distracted them from improving the desktop client.

[abychristy]

So basically you can play music while playing games wow why didn't I think of that !?!

[tealsuki]

I'm still waiting for valve to overhaul steam to make it more responsive, steam is by far the slowest program on my PC and I have my suspicions it is just an old version of internet explorer which was re-skinned.

In 2010 Valve ditched IE for Webkit to improve their in game browser so I doubt that IE is the cause of the problems. I agree it is slow for an application that is meant to be light on resources but I would imagine the program is their own custom code rather than a re-skinned version of something else.

tbh I don't think they've kept webkit up to date, since the Steam browser is easily slower than Chrome and IE10+ combined, especially on websites that are JS or Flash heavy (ie game Wikias)

[Dooms]

So basically you can play music while playing games wow why didn't I think of that !?!

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.

[directhex]

tbh I don't think they've kept webkit up to date, since the Steam browser is easily slower than Chrome and IE10+ combined, especially on websites that are JS or Flash heavy (ie game Wikias)

It's Chrome.

[GeorgeStorm]

They need to work on implementing more media stuff within steam if they want SteamOS to compete, so this seems a natural move, won't really affect me as I use my own media player when I listen to music and just alt-tab (every game than can run in borderless windowed is so they cope fine).

[directhex]

They need to work on implementing more media stuff within steam if they want SteamOS to compete, so this seems a natural move, won't really affect me as I use my own media player when I listen to music and just alt-tab (every game than can run in borderless windowed is so they cope fine).

The big draw is adding music functionality into the SteamWorks API, such that games can take control where needed - e.g. pause your music during a cut scene. iirc the Xbox has all this already, for games which support custom soundtracks.

[tealsuki]

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"

[crossy]

I'm still waiting for valve to overhaul steam to make it more responsive, steam is by far the slowest program on my PC and I have my suspicions it is just an old version of internet explorer which was re-skinned.

If Steam is the "slowest program on my PC" for you then you obviously don't have the hell-sent duo of uPlay (Ubisoft) and Origin (EA) installed. Either of those two make Steam look like a a lean, mean, game-playing machine.

On my setup, running Origin slows everything else down, and uPlay always seems to want to upgrade itself. Downloading patches on uPlay is also glacial. Only issue I have with Steam is that it sometimes decides that my network is down when I launch it, relaunching works fine.

Steam Music? Not interested.

[directhex]

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"

CEF doesn't get updated as frequently as the main Chromium source tree

[cheesemp]

Meh. Just got access to the steam streaming beta which is far more interesting than this!

[DemonHighwayman]

If Steam is the "slowest program on my PC" for you then you obviously don't have the hell-sent duo of uPlay (Ubisoft) and Origin (EA) installed. Either of those two make Steam look like a a lean, mean, game-playing machine.
On my setup, running Origin slows everything else down, and uPlay always seems to want to upgrade itself. Downloading patches on uPlay is also glacial. Only issue I have with Steam is that it sometimes decides that my network is down when I launch it, relaunching works fine.

Steam Music? Not interested.

Actually I find Origin much snappier than Steam, and uPlay I never go into although I don't remember ever noticing it when booting Ubisoft games from Steam.

It's interesting reading all the comments about Steam going through webkit and chromium over the years. I've used it since January 2007 and have never noticed any improvements in its speed over the years. Anyway good on them for getting a music player integrated, even though I never play my own stuff over a games soundtrack.

[Lucio]

Really don't fancy putting all my eggs into one digital basket, at least then you can avoid the risks if one company goes belly-up, you won't lose your entire digital life.