Strawberry
Version: 0.6.8 Web: www.strawberrymusicplayer.org
Many people think that Clementine is one of the best Kde-centric audio players. In fact, although there’s dozens of other Qt-based players with their own devoted users, Clementine is a powerful all-in-one machine, this means that it combines the features of a media organiser, online radio player and whatnot. The only issue is that it hasn’t seen an official update since 2016, and the current development version, 1.4, is not yet stable. Our hero today is Strawberry, a clone of Clementine with some audiophile-specific enhancements and more frequent releases. We first reviewed Strawberry a year ago (LXF247), and since then this player has been updated over 12 times, each bringing hundreds of small improvements. It’s fair to say that at least currently Strawberry is more actively developed than Clementine.
Still, if you put both players side by side, they look like twins. Strawberry ditched online sources support in order to concentrate on local music collection. Among other differences is the advertised ‘bit-perfect’ audio output without resampling, multiple back-end support (GST, VLC, Xine) and numerous fixes here and there – you will notice these small things if you trust your music library to Strawberry. Lyrics retrieval is a bit different, cover-fetching and some sidebar views also behave slightly different than in Clementine and so on. The most noticeable difference from the very start is the original Context section in Strawberry. It aggregates all available information about the song that is currently being played, including the album artwork, lyrics, file metadata, playback engine, etc.
So, keeping in mind that Strawberry intentionally has fewer features than Clementine – there is no CD ripping feature, no internet services, etc. – it is generally faster, easier to use, and better maintained. Many Linux distros provide Strawberry packages, and you can also find it in Snap Store ($ sudo snap install strawberry).