Steam Music Now Accepting Beta Signups 102
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."
The More "Questing" for Domination the Better (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:DRM (Score:5, Informative)
From the announcement: [steamcommunity.com]
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.
Re:Formats (Score:5, Informative)
From the FAQ: [steamcommunity.com]
Supported Audio File Formats
At the moment only MP3 files are supported. This will change over time.
Undescriptive summary (Score:5, Informative)
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.