Implementing a music status on Steam

[Manipulas]

I made an account on here just to suggest this, so it may have been suggested before.
But like Xfire I think Steam should let you show a status of what you're listening to, the same way Xfire does it where it picks it up from what's playing from your iTunes. It's all and well being on Xfire but no one uses it anymore!

Bring 'your own' music status option to Steam!

[Zerias]

I've got a thread in the forums already outlining possible music-player integrations with Steam: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2157199

While that thread mostly focused on integrating playback controls to a media player within the Steam User-interface that provides a consistent experience across all platforms Steam can and will run on; simply reading playlist data shouldn't require such strict entry barriers.

One of the problems with supporting "insert media player of your choice" with playlist updates is that there is no standardized method of publishing playlist status. Itunes, for example, has a specific API available for developing plugins that isn't used by any other application: http://developer.apple.com/sdk/itunescomsdk.html / http://developer.apple.com/sdk/#iTunesCOM

If I was in Valve's position and was looking to implement custom status updates, or allow Steam users to push a custom update of their choice, I'd expose a custom status update as an HTML5 field. All an application would have to do is just push the update of choice to an .html file which would then be read by Steam for the exposed data.

In theory any plugin that can output media player status into an HTML5 format would be capable of pushing that status update to Steam.