Strawberry
What do fruits have to do with music players? More than you might think. The freshest music fruit is called Strawberry and is a fork of Clementine, which in turn started in 2010 as a fork/port of the KDE player Amarok 1.4. At the time, Amarok was considered the best Linux music player until development was halted in 2008 in favor of a new but feature-limited version 2 branch.
With Clementine, this story repeated itself, as the last version of the orange player appeared in 2016. After that, nothing happened for years—except for some stir in the community after a Clementine developer explained the removal of a feature for high-resolution audio output with the arrogant statement: “I don’t think we care about ‘audiophile’ things.” It wasn’t until 2024 that an official version (1.4.1) of Clementine was released again.
The small Strawberry team led by developer Jonas Kvinge did better. Not only do they explicitly cater to “music collectors and audiophiles,” according to their website, and have restored the high-resolution audio output. More importantly, they have renewed the codebase and updated the program first to Qt5 and then to Qt6. Some features (primarily network ones) that were difficult to maintain and whose functionality depended on external APIs were dropped, as a feature comparison shows.
Thus, Strawberry is primarily a local music player for purists who are not bothered by the old-fashioned user interface but want to maintain playlists, edit tags, and manage large music collections. Strawberry retrieves tags, album covers, and lyrics from the internet. It also supports streaming from Subsonic, Tidal, Spotify, and Qobuz.
Like Clementine, Strawberry is also available for Windows and OS X. However, unlike with Linux, downloading is only possible with a monthly donation.
Installation
Ubuntu offers Strawberry in the Universe repository from version 22.10 LTS onwards.
sudo apt install strawberry
This installs dependencies including GStreamer for audio playback.
Strawberry’s main developer also maintains a PPA that provides new program versions immediately:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonaski/strawberry
Alternatives
There is a wide selection of audio players for Linux. Ubuntu’s and Gnome’s long-standing standard player is Rhythmbox. However, Gnome has a new Music app named – Music. KDE’s featured music apps are Amarok, still, and more recently Elisa. For those who like it simple: Audacious requires particularly few resources and works as a player without a music library.