Bring back the Music Player (or refund soundtracks)

[Tiretracker]

Games often sell soundtracks as DLC, or as standalone content.

Previously both of these were accessed via the Steam Music Player. Playlists could be built crossing multiple soundtracks, game files could be scanned for orphaned music files, and even set to scan your own My Music folder if you desired. This music player could be accessed in any game at any time and would even continue playing after starting a new game or exiting one.

Now, with the music player gone, the only music you can listen to are ones that have been set up to show up on the Steam Library. That is to say, if you paid for a soundtrack DLC that drops music files into the game's installation folder you can no longer listen to those through Steam. What you can listen to you cannot build playlists and can only listen to 1 game's soundtrack at a time; if there are multiple soundtracks for a game you cannot link them.

That is a downgrade by all senses of the word. You have removed a feature that i used on a daily basis and consequently made several purchases toward.

Not all games implemented their soundtracks "properly," and with over 9000 games new and old on Steam you can't expect every single game to play ball and update their soundtracks. The old music player could bypass this by scanning the game's installation folder for .mp3's and FLACs.

There is nothing to lose by giving us the option to use this legacy feature.

[Cxero]

allowing players to listen to music through the steam overlay was a great no-brainer feature. they made a big deal out of it when they first added it. so why is it gone now? the devil is in the details and with every passing year i feel like valve cares about their customers less and less.

[Tiretracker]

Biggest irony is
Previously it was more convenient to buy a soundtrack and get an entire album in the highest quality format without ads;
by removing the music player, it is now easier to just load up youtube and listen to the songs individually for free.

So you might say an entire market on steam is now sabotaged.

[Tiretracker]

Yeah a lot of my OST DLC's are jusjt files dropped into the game install folder, I have to dig all those out from all my games and load them into Windows Media Player.
What year is this?

[Storm User]

I have to point out that they have still not updated this page.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4DBA-E6A9-1115-7852

Soundtracks are purchasable on Steam as standalone music products or as DLC specific to a parent game (deprecated method). Some soundtracks were also included as bonus content for much older games on Steam.

With the Steam Music Player, you can access all of your soundtracks as well as any other non-steam music files that are installed on your computer.

...

How to add non-Steam music to the music player?

If you have music files on your computer, you can sync them with your Steam Music Player.

First, go to your music settings: Steam > Settings > Music: There you can specify a folder on your hard drive for Steam to scan for any supported music files. Once scanned they will be available in your music player.

If they do not plan on bringing this back, they need to update this page.

[Tiretracker]

I went to a self-help page they lead me to to "find my missing soundtracks" and the page was a 404 as well. After all this time.

I'm missing several paid soundtracks I can't listen to anymore without full on manually digging through the game files of every game that has them. I'd rather load them up on youtube --- for free.

That was what the SCAN function was for on the steam music player, which is what most games selling OST's since 2014 have probably relied on since then.

When I boot up a game I hear You Tube Ads because the last thing I may have been doing in some games is looking up walkthroughs --- or looking up the songs on youtube I can't listen to what I paid for while in game anymore because the music player does not work in the overlay or I simply cannot access them anymore ---- and steam now memorizes those pages and loads them before I even attempt to open the steam overlay. I don't have an option to disable that feature either, I have to double check at the end of every session to close all the oversized cluttered windows in the overlay before I close the game, which gets harder the lower the resolution of the game because the interface does not scale with.

This UI has more problems than the new (almost counterproductive) features it provides.

It is an utter downgrade; I could not even stretch this typing box to overview my post before sending (it was actually shrinking to half a line of text, I had to copy the text, reload the page and paste it back in) the /// lines to stretch the text box at the bottom corner are gone. The back button STILL does not work after that "update" and the 1 GB resource values are unacceptable for the meager addition of features that I don't even use.

And it still freezes, menus still ghost, and I'm in low performance mode and I bet that does nothing now because it was part of the old UI.

[ToxicBoo]

Yeah the overlay music player was really useful. I don't know why they felt the need to gut it.

[Draco]

deutsch:

Weil Steam nicht an der Kundenmeinung interessiert ist, sonst hätten die den MP3-Player gar nicht erst zerstört. Und das zeigt nur schon wo der Weg von Steam hinführt, wenn alle Alleinstellungsmerkmal entfernt werden warum dann bei einer Spieleplattform bleiben die durch diese Kundenverachtende Einstellung ehe bald Geschichte ist.

Und die Spiele die man gekauft hat, sind dann auch ohne zugriff, da ohne Internet keine Games Installieren und spielen, wegen Schreibschutz. Da ist GOG besser, da kann man sich wenigstens Sicherungskopien der Installation Dateien machen.

Da mir in den letzten Jahren Zuviel aufgestoßen ist bei Steam, schlechter Support, falsche Angeben bei Produkten (Sprache, Controllerunterstützung usw.) und dumme Verschlechterungen beim Steamclient inklusive technische Probleme habe ich entschieden die Totgeburt Steam nicht mehr als Kaufplattform zu nutzen.

Nur noch das nutzen was man schon bezahlt hat und auf andere Sicherer Plattformen umsteigen. Ist sicherer.

________________________________________

english:

Because Steam isn't interested in customer opinions, otherwise they wouldn't have destroyed the MP3 player in the first place. And that just shows where Steam's path leads, if all unique selling points are removed, why stay with a gaming platform due to this attitude of contempt for customers, which will soon be history.

And the games that you have bought are then also without access, because without the Internet you cannot install and play games because they are write protected. GOG is better because you can at least make backup copies of the installation files.

Since I have encountered too much on Steam in the last few years, poor support, incorrect information about products (language, controller support, etc.) and stupid deteriorations with the Steam client, including technical problems, I have decided to no longer use the stillborn Steam as a purchasing platform.

Only use what you have already paid for and switch to other safer platforms. Is safer.