Strawberry – audio player and music collection organizer

Last Updated on September 1, 2020

I’m a massive music fan with a large collection of CDs consisting mostly of classical, country, blues, and pop. Streaming services fills in for other music genres, so I basically dabble with a wide range of music. Linux is blessed with a mouthwatering array of excellent open source music players. But I’m always on the look out for fresh, eclectic, and innovative music players.

Strawberry is an audio player and music collection organizer. It was originally forked from Clementine. The main goal was to create a player for playing local music files that looked a bit more like Amarok with advanced soundcard options. The music player is designed for music collectors, audio enthusiasts and audiophiles. The name is inspired by the band Strawbs.

Strawberry saw its first release in April 2018, whereas Clementine hasn’t seen a formal release in a few years, but it’s still in development. I’ve been following the development of Strawberry with earnest, but until recently there was an important feature missing from this music player. That’s scrobbling. To “scrobble” a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to a web site (such as Last.fm) and added to your music profile. Strawberry’s latest build offers support for Last.fm, Libre.fm, and Listenbrainz.

Strawberry is written in C++ and Qt 5.

Installation

Compiling software is all part of the learning experience of Linux.

Compiling the latest source code involves typing the following commands at a shell.

The compilation proceeded without a hitch on Manjaro. However, with a fresh installation of Ubuntu 18.10, matters weren’t nearly as straightforward. I was missing git, cmake, pkg-config, glib-2.0, as well as a ton of development packages. Even after installing the missing dependencies, the source code didn’t compile, exiting with the following error.

The regular Ubuntu package also didn’t install complaining of several libraries being missing including libcdio17. As time was pressing, I installed the 0.4.2 release on Ubuntu from the developer’s buildbot service instead of investigating the issues. Cut me some slack!

If you have any issues in compiling the source code, or you run a distribution without a package, the developer provides an AppImage which makes it easy to run the software. AppImage is a format for distributing portable software on Linux without needing superuser permissions to install the application. All that’s required is to download the AppImage, and make the file executable by typing:

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary