Valve has pushed a surprising update to Steam that has shades of the iTunes or WinAmp to it. As well as serve as the hub for all of your PC, Mac or Linux games, the developer wants you to play all of your music through it too.

The service has added a music player in the form of a dedicated page and mini-player that pops up when you click on a track. And what's more, you can point the software in the direction of your digital music collection in order to have Steam play all of your audio files, not just those acquired through the service.

It might seem a bit of a leftfield move but it solves one problem, how to instantly play the game soundtrack albums that sometimes come with deluxe edition games purchased through Steam.

The music player is also available in Big Picture, so you can use the system as a sort-of media player when hooked up to a TV.

To celebrate the release of Steam Music, developer Valve is giving away the soundtrack albums for most of its games, including Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and the two Portals. There are also plenty of additional game soundtracks available on the Steam store to buy.

One thing we have noticed at Pocket-lint though is that we've had trouble getting the Steam music player to find our NAS drives and any other network storage, where we keep our own music files. Hopefully, that will be addressed in a future update.