FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Strawberry does not respect Qt style, KDE theme or icons on Linux.

This isn't a bug in Strawberry, it's because Strawberry uses Qt 6 and KDE is still using Qt 5. Any settings configured in KDE won't apply to Qt 6 programs. So you need to specifically configure Qt style and icon theme for Qt 6. You need the qt6ct utility (https://github.com/trialuser02/qt6ct) for this. You should ask your Linux distribution for help with setting this up as this can be different on different distributions. Once a Qt 6 release of KDE is ready this won't be a problem anymore.

For icon themes that only provide SVG icons, you need the Qt svg imageformat plugin (libqsvg.so).

Your GStreamer installation is missing a plug-in

This is a general error message from GStreamer, which is the framework Strawberry uses for playback. So there could be different reasons why you get this message.

Possible reasons:

1. Missing a GStreamer plugin, the plugin you need depends on the audio format you are trying to play, see GStreamer plugins.
2. The file you are trying to play is not a audio file, or it might be corrupt.
3. GStreamer / Strawberry does not currently support the audio format, see the audio formats supported.
4. You need to clear the gstreamer plugin cache, delete ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0/registry.x86_64.bin

Album covers in JPEG are not showing.

Check that you have the Qt JPEG plugin (libqjpeg.so).

   sudo find /usr/ -name 'libqjpeg.so'

Strawberry does not integrate natively with Wayland.

Check that you have the Qt Wayland plugin (libqwayland-generic.so and libqwayland-egl.so).

   sudo find /usr/ -name 'libqwayland-generic.so'
   sudo find /usr/ -name 'libqwayland-egl.so'

Could not open audio device for playback. Device is being used by another application.

If you are using ALSA with the hw plugin, no other programs can use the same device as Strawberry. Either select PCM as ALSA plugin, or close any other application using the same device.

Setup or installed files being detected as virus on Windows

This is a false-positive. Strawberry is open-source and all source code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer).

We do not have resources to report all false-positives to each and every anti-virus company each time they occur.

Please report this directly to your anti-virus software company (google i.e: mcafee report false positive) to find the page with information on how to do it.

An option is to use the MSVC version instead of MinGW which is more unlikely to be flagged as virus in the future.

Strawberry is using the NSIS installer which is commonly misidentified as virus by antivirus companies, see: https://nsis.sourceforge.io/NSIS_False_Positives

Buffering is stuck at 0% when playing HTTP streams

This could be issues with HTTP/2 if you have libsoup 3.0 or higher. As of Strawberry version 1.0.8 there is a setting to explicitly turn on HTTP/2 in the backend settings, make sure it is not checked.

For older versions, you can set the SOUP_FORCE_HTTP1 environment variable manually to 1, or start strawberry with: SOUP_FORCE_HTTP1=1 strawberry

SQL errors like "Unable to execute SQL query", "Unable to open database file", "Unable to fetch row", "Failed query" or similar errors

For database location, see Accessing the database.

1. Check the permissions to the database file.

   ls -la ~/.local/share/strawberry/strawberry/strawberry.db

2. Check free disk space.

   df -h

3. A common issue for this fault is the database being corrupted.

Integrity check the database to find out if there are issues:

   sqlite3 ~/.local/share/strawberry/strawberry/strawberry.db "pragma integrity_check"

4. Start with a new database.

Close Strawberry, rename the strawberry.db to .bak. Start Strawberry and see if it resolves the issue.

Volume in Strawberry does not synchronize with system volume, pulseaudio volume control or similar

This is expected behavior. Strawberry uses GStreamer which uses it's own software volume control independent of other volume controls. The volume control can be disabled in the settings.

Can you take my feature request?

No. Strawberry is a community project and most contributions (such as bug-fixes, improvements and features) need to come from the community. There are currently few contributors and no-one who can commit to take feature requests from users. Strawberry is mainly maintained by one person, and fixing bugs and keeping the project alive with the current features is a lot of work on it's own. I currently have too many features I want to add, but not enough time to do it all.

The stereo balancer or equalizer is not working

The stereo balancer and equalizer needs to be enabled before starting playback, once enabled, you can adjust it while playing.