There are plenty of music-based apps for Oculus Quest where you can dance or cut blocks to popular tunes, you can even remix music if that takes your fancy. But what if you just want to listen to your own music in VR whilst playing a videogame? Well, if you have a Spotify Premium account there is a workaround which is fairly simple.
The neat trick was highlighted by Reddit user u/ConfusionJRPG who found that premium account holders can enjoy their tracks and playlists on Oculus Quest/Quest 2 with far less fuss than sideloading content, for example.
The process works like this:
- In the headset open the Oculus Browser and head to Spotify.com.
- Login as you normally would and then start to play some music.
- Then open an app or game of your choosing (this will pause the music).
- After that, either via Spotify’s PC or mobile app login into the same account and where you can change playback device select “Web Player (Chrome)” or “Mobile Web Player” (depends on your device).
And that’s essentially it. As this is a workaround it’s not 100% plain sailing but its works well enough to give you access to Spotify’s massive music library. VRFocus has put the method into practice and found it works really well. The easiest method was to use a mobile device and look through the nose gap – no you can’t cheat and use passthrough, cuts the music off going back into the app/game. On that note, you do have to go through the process again when swapping between videogames, and the first few seconds can stutter before smoothing out.
There’s no guarantee it’ll work across the board but so far it’s worked on all the titles VRFocus tried, listening to some calming classical music playing Puzzling Places, enjoying Celtic rock whilst crushing skulls in Gorn and unleashing thumping EDM in Population: One.
Official apps like Netflix and YouTube VR do exist on Oculus Quest so there could come a time where Spotify decides to do the same thing. You can even help that process along as that idea has been put to the Spotify Community allowing you to vote. For now though at least this hack does exist.
For all the latest Oculus Quest updates, keep reading VRFocus.
