Briefly: While the soundtrack that ED ships with is very good, all long-burner games such as this suffer from soundtrack burnout, as you hear the same music over and over again. What would be useful is the ability to set up custom playlists of our own music, and crucially, to assign various playlists to the different game states (frameshift cruise, free flight, docking and combat, as well as atmospheric flight further down the line).
The best games for music I've ever played were the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3, both from Bethesda and running in the same engine. The music in these games worked on a simple principle - windows folders existed for each game state and had mp3s in them. One for dungeons, one for combat, one for exploration, one for towns. The tracks would play on shuffle according to the game state. If you dropped in your own mp3s, it would add them to the mix seemlessly. Considering the total length of original score in Oblivion was only half an hour (seriously) this was a massive boost to a game by expanding the soundtrack with your own music. Annoyingly, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim did not allow for this.
So I'd like to see similar functionality in ED. However, it's not 2007 any more and streaming music services are used as much as downloads these days. A greater feature would be the ability to assign playlists in programs like Spotify to the game states. That way it would not only allow players more freedom to find music for their game, but also to share their playlists with others. Music curation in ED could become a fun little forum sub-culture.
The best games for music I've ever played were the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3, both from Bethesda and running in the same engine. The music in these games worked on a simple principle - windows folders existed for each game state and had mp3s in them. One for dungeons, one for combat, one for exploration, one for towns. The tracks would play on shuffle according to the game state. If you dropped in your own mp3s, it would add them to the mix seemlessly. Considering the total length of original score in Oblivion was only half an hour (seriously) this was a massive boost to a game by expanding the soundtrack with your own music. Annoyingly, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim did not allow for this.
So I'd like to see similar functionality in ED. However, it's not 2007 any more and streaming music services are used as much as downloads these days. A greater feature would be the ability to assign playlists in programs like Spotify to the game states. That way it would not only allow players more freedom to find music for their game, but also to share their playlists with others. Music curation in ED could become a fun little forum sub-culture.