Steam Music Advances To Open Beta
In an announcement posted recently on the community forum, Steam revealed that its latest project, Steam Music, is now available from the desktop interface. Furthermore, this venture has now reached its open beta stages, so everyone can try it out and offer their feedback to developers.
Simply put, Steam Music is an MP3 player that can be accessed even when you are in-game with the help of the Steam Overlay. Although not one of the things that the Steam community desired the most, this new application will undoubtedly have its uses. Since a lot of users like to listen to music while playing games, at least they won't have to keep alt-tabbing to change the volume or switch to a new tune.
This new Steam application offers a stand-alone player, the possibility to setup your own library, and a few customization settings. The album and artist views are also included. Furthermore, Steam Music will work in the "Big Picture" interface, a function that can comes in quite handy, especially if you are using a different controller instead of the traditional mouse. Since this project is still in its early stage of development, a lot more features will probably be added by the time it's a finished product.
If you want to take Steam Music Beta for a spin and test it out, gaining access to the installer is very easy. All you have to do is visit this page, opt in, and Steam will tell you how to download and install the application. Hopefully, there won't be any complaints about Valve harvesting information about what music their users listen to, but since it's Valve we're talking about, chances of something like that happening are indeed very low.
