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In the age of music streaming and cloud services, there are still people who need an app to collect and play their music. If you are such a person, this article should be of interest to you.
We have already covered the Sayonara music player. Today we’re going to take a look at the Strawberry Music Player.
Strawberry Music Player: A Fork of Clementine
The Strawberry Music Player is, quite simply, an application to manage and play your music.
Strawberry contains the following list of features:
- Play and organize music
- Supports WAV, FLAC, WavPack, DSF, DSDIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex, MPC, TrueAudio, AIFF, MP4, MP3, ASF and Monkey’s Audio Audio CD playback
- Native desktop notifications
- Support for playlists in multiple formats
- Advanced audio output and device configuration for perfect playback on Linux
- Edit tags on music files
- Recover MusicBrainz Picard tags
- Album art from Last.fm, MusicBrainz and Discogs
- AudD Lyrics
- Support for multiple backends
- Audio analyzer
- Audio equalizer
- Transfer music to iPod, iPhone, MTP or USB mass storage drive
- Streaming support for Tidal
- Scrobbler with support for Last.fm, Libre.fm, and ListenBrainz
If you look at the screenshots, they probably look familiar to you. This is because Strawberry is a fork of the Clementine Music Player. Clementine has not been updated since 2016, while the most recent version of Strawberry (0.5.3) was released in early April 2019.
You might think the Strawberry music player is named after the fruit. However, its creator claims that he named the project after the Strawbs group.
Installing the Strawberry Music Player
Now let’s see how to install Strawberry on your system.
Ubuntu
The easiest way to install Strawberry on Ubuntu is to install the official snap. Just type:
sudo snap install strawberry
If you are not a fan of snaps, you can download a .deb file from Strawberry’s GitHub publish page. You can install the .deb file by double-clicking it and opening it through the Software Center.
Strawberry is not available in major Ubuntu repositories.
Felt
Installing Strawberry on Fedora is much easier. The strawberry is in Fedora repositories, so you just have to type sudo dnf strawberry. Strawberry is not available on Flatpak.
Camber
Just like Fedora, Strawberry is in the Arch repositories. All you have to type is sudo pacman -S strawberry. The same is true for Manjaro.
You can find a list of Linux distributions that have Strawberry in their repositories here. If you have openSUSE or Mageia, click here. You can also compile Strawberry from source.
Experience with Strawberry Music Player
I installed Strawberry on Fedora and Windows. I have used Clementine in the past so I knew what to expect. I have downloaded a number of audiobooks and several Old Time Radio shows because I don’t listen to a lot of music. Instead of using a dedicated audiobook player like Cozy, I used Strawberry to listen to these radio shows.
Once I told Strawberry where my files were, it quickly imported them. I used EasyTag to correct some MP3 information on old radio shows. Strawberry has a tag editor, but EasyTag allows you to edit multiple folders very quickly. Strawberry updated the media library instantly.
The big plus for me was the performance. It loaded quickly and performed well. It might have something to do with the fact that this is not another Electron app. Strawberry is written in C ++ and Qt the old fashioned way. No need to load up a whole web browser every time you want to play music, or in my case listen to audio dramas.
I couldn’t test the Tidal streaming feature because I don’t have an account. Also, I don’t sync music with my iPod.
Final thoughts
Strawberry is like a standard music player that makes it easy to manage and play your audio library.
Features that I miss from Clementine include the ability to access your media from cloud storage systems (like Box and Dropbox) and the ability to download podcasts. But then, I don’t store my media in the cloud and mostly listen to podcasts on my iPod.
I recommend trying Strawberry. You might like it as much as I do.
Have you ever used strawberries? What is your favorite music player / manager? Please let us know in the comments below.
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