Steam Music Player does exactly what it sounds like

alve's game distribution service has been going through a lot of small changes recently: not only has Steam been given a fresh coat of paint and a completely redesigned storefront, but now it plays music, too. This isn't a total surprise, of course -- Valve has been testing music playbackfor months, and even rolled the feature out to beta users over the summer -- but now Steam Music Player is available to anyone running the latest version of the client. It's a pretty simple addition, too: Steam scrubs your PC's common (or manually defined) music folders for MP3s and, well, plays them.

It does get alittlemore complex -- the music player is accessible in the client's game overlay, which means you can control and play music without alt-tabbing back to the desktop. It also offers an easy way to listen to soundtracks of supported games, but this part of the experience is a little clunky: since Steam offers soundtracks as game DLC, it appears that most of the service's music can't be downloaded separately from the game itself.

IfPortal 2isn't installed, neither is the game's music. Need some music to test it out with? Valve at least has you covered here:Half-Life, Half-Life 2and both Portal gamesare 75% off in celebration of the new feature, andallof those games come with free soundtrack DLC. Neat.