Strawberry
Version: 0.4.2 Web: https://github. com/jonaski/strawberry
some people believe that the choice of music players for Linux could be wider. You may agree or not, but when a new application comes along, why not to give it a try?
When we first launched Strawberry, we thought it looked a lot like Clementine. In fact, Strawberry is a fork of an older version of the Clementine audio player, dating from 2012-2013, but with extras and advanced features. Clementine, of course, is the popular Qt5based player that managed to win the Roundup in LXF241. In contrast, Strawberry is a new project and we were curious to find out the difference between the child and the parent.
The project page states that the player is crafted for audiophiles and connoisseurs of hi-fi sound. We placed the Settings windows of Clementine and Strawberry side by side and discovered that Strawberry has more freedom in choosing the audio back-end. You’re not limited to Pulseaudio sinks and streams, but instead have the freedom to play sound directly to an ALSA output (just like in the good old days). The purpose of this feature is not for going retro, but to provide a way for playing high-resolution audio at a 24-bit 96khz sample rate without resampling.
Bit-perfect sound is something that Strawberry developers are actively working on. They’ve also ditched all of Clementine’s ‘amateur’ online integration services in the favour of Tidal and Deezer. These are known as ‘pro’-level high fidelity streaming services for listeners with high aural standards.
Elsewhere, Strawberry and Clementine are very similar. They’re both perfect for organising your music library, managing playlists and connecting to external devices. We can’t say which player is better, but it’s definitely useful to have an alternative with some custom features. The project page already has Strawberry packages for Fedora, opensuse and Arch as well as the distro-agnostic Appimage bundle.