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Valve have celebrated the official release of the Steam Music service today by adding several of their official game and product soundtracks onto Steam as downloadable content available for free to owners of the associated title. With the conclusion of the Steam Music beta, the service is now available to all users after downloading today's Steam Client update.
The list of currently supported Valve titles includes Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, Portal 2, and the Free to Play Dota 2 documentary, all of which had their own store pages added earlier today.
Given that most of Valve's rather excellent soundtracks were never officially released, the music could only previously be acquired by directly extracting them from the game files. This would regularly mean the music was poorly organised, featuring unofficial track names used only for scripting purposes within the game, such as "HL2_song0", etc. As you would expect, this made reorganising the music extremely difficult, something no longer necessary thanks to these new additions.
Once you own one of the aforementioned titles, simply visit the game's store page and find the soundtrack listed under the "Downloadable Content" section. From there, simply download the soundtrack as you would with any other product on Steam and wait for your game to finish updating. To listen to any of your downloaded soundtracks, head on over to the Steam Music section of your library and find the album or product name. Using the "Show in System" option will also show you exactly where the files are located on your PC, allowing you to easily copy and paste them to another location or device if you're looking to enjoy them away from your Steam account.
It currently remains to be seen whether the soundtrack for Team Fortress 2 will be added to the Steam Store, but we feel it's certainly more likely than Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or the Left 4 Dead series, given their more dynamic, unstructured natures. Then again, the extremely well-received and highly dynamic Portal 2 soundtrack is already available, so what do I know!
Regardless of what may or may not come next, it's certainly exciting to be able to finally get our hands on most of Valve's soundtracks without having to rummage through game files or reorganise entire albums. If you don't yet own all of the games we previously mentioned, the Valve Complete Pack is currently on a 75% sale until October 1st 2014. Enjoy the music, everybody!
Given that most of Valve's rather excellent soundtracks were never officially released, the music could only previously be acquired by directly extracting them from the game files. This would regularly mean the music was poorly organised, featuring unofficial track names used only for scripting purposes within the game, such as "HL2_song0", etc. As you would expect, this made reorganising the music extremely difficult, something no longer necessary thanks to these new additions.
Once you own one of the aforementioned titles, simply visit the game's store page and find the soundtrack listed under the "Downloadable Content" section. From there, simply download the soundtrack as you would with any other product on Steam and wait for your game to finish updating. To listen to any of your downloaded soundtracks, head on over to the Steam Music section of your library and find the album or product name. Using the "Show in System" option will also show you exactly where the files are located on your PC, allowing you to easily copy and paste them to another location or device if you're looking to enjoy them away from your Steam account.
It currently remains to be seen whether the soundtrack for Team Fortress 2 will be added to the Steam Store, but we feel it's certainly more likely than Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or the Left 4 Dead series, given their more dynamic, unstructured natures. Then again, the extremely well-received and highly dynamic Portal 2 soundtrack is already available, so what do I know!
Regardless of what may or may not come next, it's certainly exciting to be able to finally get our hands on most of Valve's soundtracks without having to rummage through game files or reorganise entire albums. If you don't yet own all of the games we previously mentioned, the Valve Complete Pack is currently on a 75% sale until October 1st 2014. Enjoy the music, everybody!
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- I have indeed, which is rather peculiar as it does the same thing through a browser.
