Valve Soundtracks Added To Steam To Celebrate Steam Music Launch

Omnomnick

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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.

HL2Soundtrack.PNG

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!
 
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I've not used Steam Music yet, so this obviously made me interested in adding these to my collection, but whenever I click to download one of them, it takes me to a page to confirm if I have a Steam client or not, despite actually doing it through the client. When I click 'Yes' - it goes to another page confirming that the Soundtrack is now in my library, so it takes me to my library and when I go to the Music section, there's nothing there. (Not sure if it's just something I'm doing wrong?)
 
Valve have recently continued their development of the Steam Music service by adding several of their official game and product soundtracks onto Steam as downloadable content available for free to owners of the associated title.

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!

This also makes me wonder if TF2 soundtrack will be added and if there is a counter strike soundtrack. What about Blue Shift or Opposing Force? A whole lot of games could be added in the future
 
I've not used Steam Music yet, so this obviously made me interested in adding these to my collection, but whenever I click to download one of them, it takes me to a page to confirm if I have a Steam client or not, despite actually doing it through the client. When I click 'Yes' - it goes to another page confirming that the Soundtrack is now in my library, so it takes me to my library and when I go to the Music section, there's nothing there. (Not sure if it's just something I'm doing wrong?)
Have you tried adding them within the Steam Client, rather than a web browser?
 
Might have overlooked that bit. ;) - I have indeed, which is rather peculiar as it does the same thing through a browser.
Try restarting and making sure you've downloaded the most recent client update. If you've never used Steam Music before, it's likely you weren't included in the open beta (which no longer exists).
 
Try restarting and making sure you've downloaded the most recent client update. If you've never used Steam Music before, it's likely you weren't included in the open beta (which no longer exists).

I've had Steam on the open beta since just before the Steam logo was changed, I managed to find out what the issue was though, I didn't have the games in question installed. Once I installed them, I was able to have the soundtrack in my library.

The odd thing is, Portal 2's soundtrack was listed even when I hadn't installed the game, and Half Life 1's soundtrack still isn't turning up, which is certainly odd. Thanks for the help though, I'm sure it'll work itself out.
 
Valve you can become an interesting company again any time now... any... ****ing... time.
 
I had to download 2.1 GB of Half-Life 2 to get its ~140 MB soundtrack. Hmm..

(EDIT: D'oh, Blacklight brought this up already.)

This is cool though. Steam is evolving yet again!
 
I downloaded the soundtrack and opened Steam music for the first time and it was full with shit from counter-strike source servers where I had to download 100 soundfiles which are listed here now for some reason
 
anyone else not remember a lot of the tracks in the HL2 soundtrack?
 
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