Differences from Clementine

Strawberry is a fork of Clementine, it looks and behaves very similar. Beneath the hood there are more changes than immediately seen in the GUI. Also, it does not include all features that Clementine got, but focus on other features instead.

Project goals, focus and advantages

• Active development
• Compatible with Qt 5 and 6
• Frequent stable releases
• Focus on local music playback
• Focus on playback of high resolution audio and without resampling
• Focus on code improvements and bugfixes instead of adding more features
• Adapt faster to newer libraries and API changes
• Depend on less libraries and less 3rdparty code

Engine

• Support for multiple backends including Gstreamer and VLC engine
• Advanced audio output and device configuration for bit-perfect playback on Linux
• The GStreamer engine code is different and uses playbin
• GStreamer engine is changed so that the analyzer does not cause resampling
• Equalizer elements in the pipeline are not activated unless the equalizer is enabled which fixes problems with resampling
• Error handling is improved
• Option to disable volume

Other

• SQLite uses FTS5 with unicode61 tokenizer instead of the old FTS3 with a custom tokenizer.
• New context view with song playing info and album cover
• Improved album cover fetching and cover manager with better album covers from Tidal and Deezer
• Lyrics are retrieved using API's instead of scraping HTML
• New rewritten scrobbler with caching and support for multiple providers: Last.fm, Libre.fm and ListenBrainz
• The queue manager is moved into the tab for easier access
• Improved playlist background image settings for displaying album cover and custom image
• Option to automatically save album covers to the album directory
• Streaming support for Subsonic and Tidal
• Tabbar is improved
• Organizing music is improved
• Transcoding music is improved
• Settings have been reorganized
• New global shortcuts backend for X11 and Windows
• Lots of improvements to code and bugfixes

Features missing

Some features found in Clementine have not been included. Some of them, like the internet services and song and artist bio depended on clementine services. Others have not been included to make maintaining the project easier and less time consuming. Basically, the more code, the more job it is to maintain a project. Also, to make sure features work it require developers and testers who actually use the features. Some features might have been dropped because we want to rewrite it or do it differently.

• CD Ripper: Better options exist such as k3b, also the main focus is a music player, not a cd ripper.
• Podcast support: Work was started on integrating it, but never finished.
• Various streaming services and radios: These require each a API token for Strawberry, they require lot of work to test, maintain and make sure they work for each release, an account with each service, also, some of them were broken.
• Cloud storage: Same as above, also few people use them and the main focus is local music.
• Spotify: A new Spotify integration has been made and will be available in the next release on Linux and Windows MSVC.
• Song info: It is replaced by the context which also has lyrics.
• Artist bio: It depended on clementine services. Work started on a new one, but didn't find a good API with artist biography.
• Visualizations.
• The extras stuff and background streams.
• Network remote: We don't have an android app, and no contributors to work on it.
• wii remote control: Few people use it, we don't have anyone to maintain the code.