Create your own soundtrack using this neat little workaround. Ever wish you could jam out to your favorite tunes while cracking skulls in GORN or dunking on fools in Echo Arena on the Oculus Quest/Quest 2? Well, now you can. Reddit user u/ConfusionJRPG has discovered a neat little workaround allowing those with a Spotify Premium account and Oculus Quest/Quest 2 headset to listen to music while enjoying their favorite VR content. It’s quick, easy, and an absolute game-changer for certain games and apps. Testing it out myself, I found the process surprisingly quick and easy. The following method should work for both the original Oculus Quest as well as the Oculus Quest 2.
And that’s it! You can now access a massive catalog of music while simultaneously enjoying your favorite Oculus Quest games and apps. Whether you’re connected via a smartphone or computer, you’ll have full control over the experience, including volume and song selection. Of course, it goes without saying that u/ConfusionJRPG’s workaround is far from an official solution, so don’t be surprised if you experience a few hiccups along the way. There’s also no guarantee this solution will work with every game and app available on the Quest Store, though we’ve personally experienced zero issues so far with a decent selection of games. Kick back and enjoy some smooth jazz while playing a few hands in PokerStars VR, jam out to EDM while dismembering zombies in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, or listen to a captivating podcast while tieing off in Topgolf with Pro Prutt; the sky’s the limit.
Quest hackers Basti564 and threethan figured out how to run background Android apps with audio on Quest. Quest has built-in support for sideloading and running 2D Android apps, but normally launching a VR app kills any running 2D app. This new hack seems to bypass this limitation, letting you do things like listen to music from Spotify or talk to friends on Discord while playing VR. Bastian added this hack as a feature of their tool Oculess, which lets you unlink your Facebook account from your Quest and disable telemetry. How To Enable Background AudioTo use Oculess, just download it from GitHub and sideload it using SideQuest or Oculus Developer Hub. If your headset isn’t already in developer mode or you don’t know how to sideload apps you can follow our guide here. If you have an older version of Oculess you’ll need to update to the latest release. Once you’ve installed Oculess, follow these steps to make it possible to use apps like Spotify or Discord in the background:
That’s it! You can now start a Spotify playlist or join a Discord call then head into a VR game. This should also work for other 2D Android apps which use background audio. Steps 1, 2, and 3 only need to be done once, but you’ll need to repeat Step 4 every time you reboot your headset if you want to use background audio. As always, it’s important to note that sideloading hacks like this is done at your own risk – in the worst case scenario you could need to factory reset your Quest. That said, we were able to perform these steps with no side effects. Love the Quest, but one of the most frustrating things about the current setup is that there seems to be no way of playing music in the background. I personally love to draw on Quest, would love to be able to stream some tunes while drawing. Also if Im hanging with a friend in an app, it would be amazing if you can share music while exploring the metaverse together. Any way to get around this or on the horizon? |