Strawberry For Linux

Strawberry is a feature-packed, free, open-source, and cross-platform (works on Windows and Linux, as well as macOS, but limited to sponsors) music player and music collection organizer.

Since Strawberry is a fork of Clementine, it makes a lot of sense to compare it to Clementine, even though Clementine is no longer actively developed (active development stopped somewhere around 2016).

Even though Strawberry is a fork of Clementine, and despite their appearances being somewhat similar, there are a lot of differences between the two.

Strawberry doesn't have all the features found in Clementine, and it somewhat does it's own thing. There's a lot to talk about here, but some of the most important aspects that power Strawberry are active development, Qt 5/6 compatibility, focus on local music playback (especially in high resolution without resampling), support for new libraries and API changes, and less dependency on third party code.

Other than that, there a tons of improvements including improvements to the backends (GStreamer and VLC engine), error handling, scrobbler with caching (and support for multiple providers), and a hefty amount of code and under-the-hood improvements.

Last but not least, Strawberry makes away with some Clementine features, just to keep the project easy to maintain, fresh, and modern. These include the internet services (and song/artist bio), CD ripper, podcast support, cloud storage, spotify support (libspotify doesn't work anymore), just to name a few.

The short answer is - yes, actually one of the best. The app's GUI may not portray that feeling (I'm the first to admit that), but Strawberry brings a lot to the table.

It's quite clear that the developers of the project wanted to make Strawberry better aimed at local playback and strip down all the unecessary or outdated elements (that could very well be considered bloat).

Let's look at what makes Strawberry great, its features. For starters, there's support for all the popular media formats such as WAV, FLAC, WavPack, OGG FLAC, OGG Vorbis, OGG Opus, OGG Speex, MPC, TrueAudio, AIFF, MP4, MP3, ASF, and Monkey's Audio.

The app also provide a lot when it comes to music collection organizing and this includes a decent playlist managment option (with support for smart and dynamic playlists), the ability to edit tags for audio files, automatic tag fetch from MusicBrainz, album cover art retrieval from Last.fm, MusicBrainz, Discogs, Musixmatch, Deezer, Tidal, Qobuz, and Spotify, as well as automatic lyric retrieval.

The app also boasts a decent audio analyzer, and audio equalizer, support for audio CD playback, advanced audio output and device configuration, scrobbler with support for Last.fm, Libre.fm, and ListenBrainz. And, lastly, the native desktop notifications that work really great.

Strawberry is a successful project that should very much appeal to (almost) all Clementine fans out there.

The music player takes what made Clementine so good (its plethora of features), removes various features that are not viable in today's world, adds a few ones of its own, and basically provides the user with a complete package - a decent, well-maintained, feature-packed music player that's free and works on some of the most popular Linux distributions.