Have tons of local music files? Strawberry is a good choice for managing your digital music collection.
Strawberry is a free open-source music player and organizer that works on Linux, Windows, and macOS. With GStreamer library, it plays most audio files including WAV, FLAC, WavPack, Ogg Vorbis, Speex, MPC, TrueAudio, AIFF, MP4, MP3, ASF and Monkey’s Audio.
And, it provides a fast and easy-to-use user interface to manage large music collection for music collectors and audiophiles. While having ability to edit tags, automatically retrieve tags from MusicBrainz, fetch album cover and song lyrics from different online music services.
It also plays audio CD, has streaming support for Subsonic-compatible servers, Tidal and Qobuz (unofficial & requires API tokens from an official app), and supports for transferring music to mass-storage USB players, MTP compatible devices.
As well, it has ability to stream your favorite radios, such as Last.fm, Libre.fm and ListenBrainz.
Strawberry vs Clementine:
Strawberry is a fork of Clementine music player. They have similar user interface, but different release circles, project goals and advantages.
Clementine has more features, such as CD ripper, podcast, various streaming services and radios, cloud storage, and remote control. But, the latest stable version is v1.3.1 released 5 years ago. The development suspended for a few years, though it’s back in 2020. Now, it rolls out new development releases per days. It has more than 4 hundred pre-releases in less than 2 years. While the stable version is still in 2016.
Strawberry focuses on local music and high resolution audio playback without resampling. It depends on less libraries and less third-party code, and adapts faster to newer libraries and API changes. It’s now compatible with Qt 5 and 6, and releases new stable versions every a few months.
For more about the different between the two music player and organizer, see the wiki page.
How to Get Strawberry for your machine:
Strawberry is available in official repositories of most Linux distributions, e.g., Fedora, Arch Linux, CentOS 8, openSUSE, and Solus. User may just search for and install it from system package manager or app store.
Install Strawberry in Ubuntu:
For Ubuntu / Linux Mint user, there’s an official PPA that so far maintains the latest packages for Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, and Ubuntu 21.10.
Open terminal either by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard or from start menu. When it opens, run the commands below one by one to add the PPA and install the music player:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonaski/strawberry
sudo apt update
sudo apt install strawberry
(Optional) If you want to remove the music player, run the command below in a terminal window:
sudo apt remove --auto-remove strawberry
And you may manage the PPA repository via “Software & Updates” utility at Other Software tab.
Install Strawberry in Windows, macOS, and other Linux:
For source code, Windows and macOS binary packages, they are available to download at the github releases page via “Assets”:
As well, other Linux user may install the music player as universal Flatpak package using the Flathub repository.
That’s all. Enjoy!