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I'm not a big user of specified music. Although I do like to keep something playing in the background, I almost never make it loud enough to affect the game in any way.

Still, for those times when you do want to use it, or if you plan on using it a lot I have two additional peices of advise. First, get a remote. It makes the whole thing less disruptive than sitting there and messing with the CD player, or worse, having to get up to do that. And second, make yourself a quick cheat sheet with tips on when to use a certain track. Most of the time the titles won't tell you things like "good for a chase" or "good for a scary feel."

I use a laptop, of course the gamers at the table just covered their eyes and shook their heads, as they heard the Fox fanfare start up before the Star Wars theme music...

I think the Star Wars soundtrack is exactly what works at pivotal moments to bring players into the concept that they are playing Star Wars and not some cheesy knock-off.

I don't seem to have the link to the website, but there is one that has a ton of Star Wars music clips on it, even whole songs. I have all the best clips on my computer. All orchestral in the vein of Star Wars; not that faux rock crud, not industrial, and not rock. Absolutely perfect for a game in a way that doesn't remove you from the fact that this is Star Wars and which carries combat or roleplay moments well.

Great article, very helpful.

I haven't used SW music yet, but Deadairis is right, there's a lot of good non-SW scores that thematically "match".

For my D&D campaign, I used LOTR scores, tracks from the Neverwinter Nights PC games, and would organize the tracks into folders: downtime/village, traveling, peril, combat...

Music is great, but I've played at people's houses where they were playing something in the background that totally yanked me out of the game. I've never understood the supposed correlation between fantasy RP and metal.

I use music in all my games ... and with Star Wars, I've used the SW OSTs, but also use some music from other sources ... depending on the feel of the campaign of course.
In the past, I've ran a game where the players were part of the Old Republic and worked on a larger patrol vessel. For that, I used a hefty amount of Star Trek (mainly from the movie and DS9) with a smattering of B5 thrown in for tension scenes.
The current game I'm running is inspired a bit more by Firefly and Cowboy Bebop, so I use a bit more jazz and use some music from the SW OSTs, Last Starfighter and a good mix of modern action movies, sci-fi and a bit of other tracks that I have.
I'm in the planning stages of my next 4 week arc of SW, and I'm looking at throwing some Morricone into the mix as they visit a backwater world. May even have to run a gun fight