I don't understand the need for a music player. It would have been nice 10 years ago, but this isn't 10 years ago.

It's mostly for Big Picture mode for people who are using their computer as a console so Steam is really the only thing they are using on it, but there's no reason not to add it for everyone else anyways at that point.

They've also been working on Spotify integration for it in the background.

Steam on the TV is getting really fucking good. When I say that, I am mostly referring to the in-home streaming feature that has been getting progressive improvements over the past six months. I recently took two 360 controllers and hooked them up to a $150 Chromebook my friend's wife wasn't using, and I then put Ubuntu linux on it. Using Steam's in-home streaming feature, my Windows 8 gaming PC streams the games to the Chromebook, which outputs it in hardware decoded 1080p to my new TV in the living room.

The latency for this entire exchange is lower than 10ms. For me, it is almost impossible to tell that I am not playing directly on my gaming computer. When I figured this out it blew my mind completely. I have people over all the time to play games on the TV. All of them notice zero input lag and say they thought they were just playing on a console. I'm pretty convinced this is going to change the console game up a lot once Steam devices start rolling out at affordable prices.

What's also crazy is that the games don't even need to be Steam games to stream them. Most games you add via "Add non-steam game to library" work fine, including every popular emulator.

There are of course downsides, the largest being that you obviously cannot use your Windows PC while a game is being streamed because it needs to have the game open, rendering, and encoding. A lot of older Steam games aren't supported unless they have "Full controller support". L.A. Noire for example is driving me crazy because it has a launcher window that pops up every time I run it. It was also a bitch to get two 360 controllers to work in linux and get it to a point where 2 players could play.

I think drunken 2p battleblock theatre is worth the grind, but I can understand why the grind of figuring this shit out would turn many people off.

You probably see where this is going - getting back to the music player. Valve wants Steam to drive inexpensive PCs into the living room and turn the console industry upside down, and I think they are about to hit a home run if they figure out how to make it easy for the average consumer to do.

>They've also been working on Spotify integration for it in the background.

OH GOD MAH BALLS

does the music player play flac/aiff/wav?

Probably not. It didn't during the beta.

ummmm....Unless i'm completely missing something you can't shuffle your entire collection of music which is really dumb "making it easy to listen to your music collection while you play games on Steam". You can shuffle by album or artist but not all of your music. Only way I can think of doing it is by making a playlist and adding each album to it individually which once again is really dumb. On top of that there is no way to use keybinds to skip tracks play pause etc. If it was still in beta I would understand but they released this to everyone. why would you implement something that's not done?

Portal, Half-life and Free to Play Soundtracks were just released as free dlc to all game owners. It's opt in (unlike U2) so go to the game page or all new releases on the store page to pick them up.

There's also no way of seeking songs. Feels like something that should've stayed in beta for a little longer.

I like it, I typically keep my music in one playlist and make a new one every few days so it suits me fine. It also works with the multimedia keys on my keyboard which is nice.

EDIT: it only works with my keyboard's multimedia keys when I'm tabbed in to the window itself...

when you buy music from steam does it come over as mp3 or m4a?

MP3 is the norm as far as i've seen

kbps?

The fact that I can't use my massive collection of .wav's for this is a deal breaker. It shouldn't be hard to let us use lossless files.

Differs from dev to dev, Supergiant of Bastion and Transistor fame are the only ones i have that upload 320kbps, rest are 120-200 range

why do you use wavs anyway? they just take up a heap of space for no reason

Only says mp3 in the update notes, does anyone know whether it plays m4a and flac?

I set this up on my awful laptop last night and it worked great. The only problem I ran into is that I get 3-5 second lag spike every 10 minutes or so. These are the settings I'm using: http://puu.sh/bNo6L/057e29ab1c.png
http://puu.sh/bNo8d/51f17ac541.png

Have you experienced this problem? If so what settings should I tweak to resolve it? I've read online that some people have had the same issue but I couldn't find a solution.

I can't wait to listen to my fifty copies of the robocop theme in flac.

because wavs will play on literally anything
aiffs play on a lot of devices, but won't natively play on android (same with m4a)
flacs play on way more devices but won't natively play on apple devices

I actually can hear the quality difference in mp3's and .wav's too.

Edit: It's minor and mostly just cymbals/roominess. Not like I'm bullshitting about super hearing, but it's audible, kinda like the difference in 200 fps vs 400. Small but noticible.

Try an ethernet connection if possible to see if it's your wireless. I would also try changing the bandwidth setting to auto and enabling hardware acceleration, as I've found hw accel on both the server and client appear to reduce latency a lot (though the video quality may go down)