Forza Motorsport 7 will feature OneDrive music support

By Richard Devine
last updated

All the talk of hot new cars and stunning new locations is great, but sometimes the details are just as important.

Something that many folks may have skipped by is the in-game music. In Forza Motorsport it takes a much less prominent role than it does in the Horizon series, but it's still important and it still has a very central part to play in Forza 7.

And you'll no doubt be delighted to hear that your own music can feature in Forza 7 via OneDrive.

Forza Horizon 3

Groove Music was first integrated into 2016's Forza Horizon 3 as an in-game radio station.

This isn't the first time we've seen this, last year's Forza Horizon 3 had Groove Music support built in to stream both your own and your Groove-selected tracks. In our session at E3 with the developers, specifically OneDrive was discussed as a source of music, but it'd be fairly easy to assume this would extend to full Groove Music support as in Forza Horizon 3.

How to use Groove Music in Forza Horizon 3

So, how does it actually feature in Forza 7? In the Forzavista garage, you've got speakers as part of the decor, for want of a better term, and these will play music while you're in this area of the game. So if you've hooked up your own cloud-based music, it'll blast through these.

It'll also be heard from the in-grandstand speakers on the circuits you're racing on, which is a really neat idea and kicks up the immersive experience a little. Rather than just hearing it as background music as you do in Forza Horizon 3, it sounds like you'll catch a little piece of it as you storm past the grandstands.

It's not always about the visuals!

Forza Motorsport 7 will launch on October 3 on Xbox One and Windows 10, with an early access period beginning on September 29 for Ultimate Edition buyers.

See at Microsoft (opens in new tab)

Richard Devine
Richard Devine
Managing Editor - Tech, Reviews

Richard Devine is a Managing Editor at Windows Central with over a decade of experience. A former Project Manager and long-term tech addict, he joined Mobile Nations in 2011 and has been found on Android Central and iMore as well as Windows Central. Currently, you'll find him steering the site's coverage of all manner of PC hardware and reviews. Find him on Mastodon at mstdn.social/@richdevine

22 Comments
  • Please don't make us have to pay for Groove Music for this.
  • Works for free in Horizon 3, just dump your music in OneDrive, create a Forza playlist in the app on your PC, import said playlist into the game. Guy in our session specifically said OneDrive, not Groove. The assumption (based on last years game) is that it will extend to Groove subscribers as well
  • Awesome! i always thought you need a Groove Music pass to do it in FH3, I'm glad you don't.
  • It was always advertised that way, probably to try and upsell a few subscriptions ;-)
  • Ah, I imagine that obviously the pass is needed to use the "radio" portion of the service, but not for OneDrive, same as the program itself. That is really awesome. That being said, when a great song is on I might end up stopping near the in game speakers so I can listen to the whole thing.
  • "Fastest lap: 17 minutes" - Dammit, need some shorter songs!
  • When I tried out the feature in FH3 yesterday, any time I got up to speed in my vehicle, the music started freezing or skipping or slowing down like it required more processing power to integrate it into the overall game audio. Couldn't stand having my favorite songs butchered so I had to turn off the feature.
  • Been using it for the last year. Never had a single issue. Plays my 1000+ song list shuffled no problem at all.
  • "just dump your music in OneDrive" You say that like it's not a pain. You don't just dump 60+ GB into OneDrive on a whim, especially if you aren't paying MS for the storage. It'd be a few hours of uploading the music just to stream it. If MS would stop progressing backwards, then we'd just have the option to plug in external devices or rip CDs or transfer it to the console's HDD. They're making us work extra for an inferior solution.
  • Eh, it took my a while to rip all my CD's to the PC, but in terms of uploading them, it happens automatically and in the background, sure it takes a while with shoddy Oz Internet, but I can now access music on my phone, PC and xbox right away without taking up space on any of the devices. That being said it's not the sort of thing I would recommend if you only want to use it in this game, at least not as much music as I have. And, I guess, more choices are better than less so your suggestion is a good one. Especially seeing as it was something the Xbox 360 could do.
  • See, I'm the exact opposite. I'd rather take up space on everything. Space is cheap, data/bandwidth is the expensive part. I've got a 3-TB HDD in my PC and a 128-GB microSD card in my phone. I'll take that over the terrible life of downgrading my music from FLAC to MP3 to be functional for streaming, then eating through data to listen to music. I'd rather have things of higher quality at a lower cost. It's nice to get that instant sync, but then again, Groove is such a dumpster fire at tagging music well that I can't even bother using it on my PC. I just don't see any justification for taking local sotrage away. It's just MS saying they know their users are total sheep who won't push back when treated like garbage and having basic functionality taken away. It's just going to force people into buying OneDrive storage and get them to eat through their data caps faster on mobile devices. I listen to music almost every time I'm in the car (including the 30+ hours I spent driving halfway across the country in the past week), and any thought of streaming music in that scenario is laughable. I'd have eaten through the month's data allotment in a week, and I'd have gotten inferior audio quality than by ripping and transfering it.
  • If someone pays for OneDrive just to play their music in this one game then they have priorities all mixed up. That said if all you want is to play your own music from a local drive then you can plug it in and play it as background music. It's not the hardest thing on earth :) https://www.windowscentral.com/how-play-music-usb-drive-using-simple-background-music-player
  • Having high quality flacs are great and definitely a reason to not need a One Drive option. Most people have Mp3s, or at least most of my 100GB is MP3s and having the ability to know I can access that data anywhere without having to carry around an extra drive or device is great. Sure wireless bandwidth is a premium, but if you want to share you music while at a friends and you forgot your hard drive or there device doesn't support FLAC and all you have is your phone then you would just use their wifi. I assume you just load all your music on a micro SD and stick it in your phone. Both solutions work, it all depends on needs and wants.
  • Yeah, the choice is nice, and that's what I'm advocating for. I'm not saying that online means should stop, I'm saying that the removal of local means was unnecessary, except to try to coax users into the online services some of us don't like. It give MS a direct line to my data, and even though it's just music, I don't trust them with my personal data (it's just music...until it isn't). Your scenario, I would be able to easily get around it. If I'm at a friend's, I have WiFi access. If my stuff is local, and I was silly enough to forget a cable (admittedly not hard to do when I only have one A-to-C USB cable), I always have the option to hit up WiFi, upload, and transfer that way. I don't even have to go to OneDrive, I can use ANY online storage service. It's pretty uncommon to lack FLAC support these days though, so I wouldn't worry on that. Instead, it would be more about whether the friend has device storage necessary to hold those FLAC files, but it's also not like I've ever had a scenario where I went to a house and there was this random moment of "hey, let me just start sucking up all the music from your phone out of nowhere." It's not a quick or spontaneous process, so I'd know that was happening before I went over, most likely.
  • Well its good news.
    Like this feature in fh3, and in the game like F1 always using groove music app...coz for me its very very boring just to listen engines ) Of coz on tv live Formula 1...its different situation, only engines wanna hear...paradox:)
  • I would much rather they support Spotify, even though that won't happen with Groove around.
  • It won't happen more likely because Sony has an exclusivity deal with Spotify on console. Same reason there's no official app coming anytime soon. Not all Microsoft's fault.
  • Love this kind of feature.  They should open it up to other services and more open play games
  • This feature is amazing. So glad its coming to Forza 7.
  • I'd like this if it could just play a folder or artist/album. My music collection is massive, and I already spend enough time manually renaming, tagging, and uploading it. I don't make playlists because I don't have time for that kind of micromanagement.
  • Man, I wish Microsoft would just stop making progress by punishing people who own their own music. Let me plug in my device or put local music driectly on the device for this stuff, like we were able to do on the XB and XB360. Making it a needlessly difficult task by forcing my local storage online to consume bandwidth is lame. It's just another way to try to rope people into their digital subscriptions, and I'm never goign to pay for OneDrive storage to hold the music I have locally stored with ease. I'd sooner just play it out of my own speakers, as opposed to following these complicated means of listening.
  • See my comment above to your identical comment. You can just plug in your own drive. It's not the perfect solution. But it works.