GStreamer plugins

Strawberry uses GStreamer for the audio backend, to play different audio formats you need different plugins.

On Linux distributions you need to install individual packages to get support for different formats.

Windows and macOS releases have all the listed plugins bundled in the installer.

On Linux plugin files are usually installed in a directory called gstreamer-1.0, examples are.: /usr/lib/gstreamer-1.0 or /usr/lib64/gstreamer-1.0

The gstreamer plugin files are called libgstPLUGIN.so, for example libgstflac.so

gst-inspect

To check if a plugin is installed and properly detected, you can use.:

  gst-inspect-1.0 <plugin>

For example.:

   gst-inspect-1.0 flac

Returns:

   Plugin Details:
     Name                     flac
     Description              The FLAC Lossless compressor Codec
     Filename                 /usr/lib64/gstreamer-1.0/libgstflac.so
     Version                  1.20.3
     License                  LGPL
     Source module            gst-plugins-good
     Source release date      2022-06-15
     Binary package           openSUSE GStreamer-plugins-good package
     Origin URL               http://download.opensuse.org
     
     flacdec: FLAC audio decoder
     flacenc: FLAC audio encoder
     flactag: FLAC tagger
     
     3 features:
     +-- 3 elements

gst-plugins-base

The base package is almost always installed whenever GStreamer is installed.

Plugin	Type
ogg	Ogg container formats
vorbis	Ogg Vorbis decoding and encoding
opus	Ogg Opus decoding and encoding

gst-plugins-good

The good package is required for common formats such as FLAC and MP3.

Plugin	Type
flac	FLAC decoding and encoding
speex	Speex decoding and encoding
wavpack	WavPack decoding and encoding
mpg123	MP3 decoding
lame	MP3 encoding
id3v2mux	MP3 encoding (Adds ID3v2 tags)
soup	HTTP/HTTPS client

gst-plugins-bad

Some distributions such as Fedora does not include some of the bad plugins for licensing reasons.

Plugin	Type
faad	AAC/MP4 decoding
faac	AAC/MP4 encoding
fdkaac	AAC/MP4 decoding and encoding
musepack	MPC decoding
aiff	AIFF decoding
asfmux	Microsoft ASF format (WMA) encoding
openmpt	Module music (MOD, S3M, XM, IT) decoding
bs2b	Improve headphone listening of stereo audio records using the bs2b library
hls	HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)
dash	Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)

gst-plugins-ugly

Plugin	Type
xingmux	MP3 encoding (Add XING tags to mpeg audio files)
asf	Microsoft ASF format (WMA) decoding
cdio	Read audio from audio CDs

gst-libav

Plugin	Type
libav	Monkey's Audio, DSF, DSDIFF and Various formats supported through ffmpeg

MP3 encoding

For MP3 encoding (Transcoding to MP3 in Strawberry) you need both lame, id3v2mux and xingmux.