Like others have said, why would I want this? I can see that free to play games might have them, since most of them are quite repetitive at times, but I usually never used substitute music unless I knew I would be grinding a lot.
Steam Music Beta Coming Soon
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
I don't see the point. The BPM is SteamOS's "console mode". It's supposed to be optimized for gaming and gaming alone. It has to run one program, a game, and run it well (something which it can't really do yet in all cases, it's a beta), with maybe some extra bits in the overlay. All controlled with a gamepad. Maybe Valve will release an API for people to make overlay plugins. And of course there will be first party apps.Strazdas said:
For everything else there's a normal linux desktop environment. Here people can launch games from the regular Steam client and run whatever they want in the background.
It seems that Valve are looking to make Steam that all-in-one piece of software. With games, as well as game development tools being sold on the marketplace, and now music entering that fold, I wouldn't be surprised if Steam started selling films and TV shows soon.
Ups, looks like I've sown a bit of confusion. There are two slightly different kinds of BPM. One where the client runs in BPM and one where the whole OS runs in BPM.Strazdas said:
By default SteamOS launches in Big Picture Mode as it's own custom linux session. there's no real special name for this yet, SteamOS tester usually call it just BPM. That is it's "console mode". In here you only have access to games and specific Steam apps. That's what I meant by no multitasking in BPM mode. This new Steam Music app is aimed primarily at this mode.
It's possible to switch SteamOS to a GNOME desktop environment with a regular Steam client. And yes, just like in Windows and Mac, here you can switch the Steam client to BPM, with a media player of your choice running in the background. Or you can use Steam Music if you don't want to Alt+Tab.
So then essnetialy the defautl steamOS "BPM" is basicalyl that archaic problematic system console users had to deal with for ages? why would anyone want to do that, especially in this age when computer power is so far above times when you would need to dedicate maximum power for single application that runnig a compact (read: not what consoels run now) OS like, i dont know, LINUX, would take so little effort that it would not slow down your gaming at all.grimallq said:
i see this as a MASSIVE flaw in SteamOS and they should have known better.
Note: SteamOS is Linux, a customized Debian Wheezy distro. The default BPM session is just a simplified, custom GUI. It's identical to normal Big Picture Mode, with the exception that nothing else is running in the background. Because of that you normally have access only to stuff available from Steam/Valve. It's also very easy to switch to a separate GNOME desktop session running in parallel. Or just set it up to run Steam in Big Picture on top of a GNOME desktop.Strazdas said:
Also note that this BPM session is meant for Steam Machines, where the default (and usually only) input device is a gamepad. A lot of this stuff can change, it's still beta.
Might be good for the SteamBox (or whatever it's called now).
Useless for me; I already run VLC player in the background with some underlay controls.
Useless for me; I already run VLC player in the background with some underlay controls.
Cool. Well, it's not like more options is a bad thing, so I don't get why people are complaining about it being unnecessary. Are VLC and WinAmp unnecessary because Windows Media Player exists? Hell no, you're free to use the media player of your choice and now you have another one. And this one will work in SteamOS's console mode.grimallq said:
is SteamOS available yet, in beta form? I'd love to try it out.
If it's "something extra" that you can have sure, since nowadays I'm mostly into "just gameplay" kind of games and they usually lack any important dialigue I just put on music to play along, and since I'm forced to alt+tab this might come in handy. But if it's forced and takes more resources than the game cuz it's poorly implemented... fuck it.
What's "Zune"??vrbtny said: