Strawberry is ripe for managing music collections

There are dozens of music-player applications for Linux; the options range from bare-bones programs that only play local files to full-blown music-management projects with a full suite of tools for managing (and playing) a music collection. Strawberry is in the latter category; it has a bumper crop of features, including smart playlists, support for editing music metadata tags, the ability to organize music files, and more.

Strawberry is something of an old-school music manager; it is designed for users who are serious about maintaining a local music collection rather than simply consuming whatever is available via streaming services. Its set of features includes just about everything users need for importing new music, creating playlists for every occasion, and weeding out duplicate songs, as well as maintaining an accurate and searchable database of the collection. It's written in C++, uses the Qt 6 framework, depends on GStreamer for codec support, and is available under the GPLv3.

Growing Strawberry

Creator and maintainer Jonas Kvinge released the first version of Strawberry, which got its name from the English rock band Strawbs, in 2018. Its origins go back quite a bit farther than that, though. One might say that Amarok planted the seed for the project.

Kvinge had started working on a fork of the Clementine music player in 2013, because he wanted to take it in a different direction. Specifically, he wanted to focus on local music collections instead of music stored on cloud services, and to drop features, such as ripping CDs, that are better handled by other programs.

The Clementine project was also born out of a desire to go in a different direction than its predecessor; it started in 2010 as a fork of the Amarok music player's 1.4 release after Amarok 2.0 was released with a completely redesigned, but not universally beloved, user interface. Clementine's developers ported the Amarok 1.4 code base to the Qt 4 framework and carried on where it left off.

Like many folks, I didn't care for the Amarok redesign, and started using Clementine instead. Unfortunately, that project stopped receiving updates in early 2016, so it was fortunate that Kvinge decided to launch his fork not long afterward. Clementine development seems to have picked up again after a long absence; there are signs of life in its Git commit history and automated releases being published on GitHub; however, the front page of the project's web site still advertises the 1.3.1 release from April 2016.

Strawberry, meanwhile, has remained active since it appeared on the scene. The project's last major release, which dropped support for Qt5 and shed some unmaintained features, was the 1.2.1 release in 2024. The most recent minor release, 1.2.19, came out on April 17, 2026; it included a new shuffle mode and several bug fixes. Kvinge is the most active contributor by far, with more than 1,000 commits in the past two years. There are about 40 other contributors who show up in the commit history in the same time period, but all of their contributions are in the single digits.

Most popular desktop Linux distributions include it in their repositories, though they may lag a bit behind the most recent version. The project provides builds for several distributions, so users can grab the latest stable release build or an unstable version if they're feeling adventurous.

Music management

Strawberry largely retains the classic look and feel of Amarok 1.4 and other desktop music players from that era; the left-hand panel shows music sources and the majority of the real estate is devoted to the playlist area. Users can manually search through directories for music files each time they'd like to listen to something, but Strawberry is designed for people who want to manage their music collection and keep it well organized. The application is designed for cataloging a music collection contained in one or more directories, such as ~/Music.

The location of the collection is specified in the settings under "General -> Collection". After adding a directory (or directories), Strawberry will scan for music files, parse their metadata, and add the information to its SQLite database (~/.local/share/strawberry/strawberry/strawberry.db on Linux). This can take a while if the collection is fairly large; I have nearly 29,000 tracks in my collection on an external SSD and it takes more than 30 minutes to scan the whole thing. In addition to specifying the location of the collection, users can configure Strawberry to do new scan on each startup—or not. It's a good idea to turn off the "Update the collection when Strawberry starts" option to avoid unnecessary rescans since they can take quite a while; this is especially true if a music collection is stored on an external device that may not always be connected. Strawberry can be prompted to monitor the collection for changes only.

Once Strawberry finishes scanning, the collection will show up in the appropriately named "Collection" tab. Users can decide what kind of grouping to use to sort the collection depending on their preferences; for example, it's possible to group by artist and then album, or by year, genre, or by any of a number of other tags. For this reason, it's important that music in a collection is well-tagged.

Strawberry allows users to edit tags and even complete tags automatically using information from the same database that the MusicBrainz Picard music tagger uses. However, its automatic completion is much less ergonomic than Picard's; Strawberry's "tag fetcher" requires users to select matches from MusicBrainz for each track and does not display as much information as is shown when using Picard. I find that it's better to clean up tags with Picard before importing music into the collection, but Strawberry's tag-editing features are still handy for making small edits. Even the information in the MusicBrainz database is sometimes wrong.

One of the features I appreciate about Strawberry is the ability to rename files in the collection or when importing into the collection to organize them according to whatever naming scheme a user prefers; all that is required is to specify the file-naming options to use, and it will rename them accordingly.

Playlists

One thing that may be slightly counterintuitive is that Strawberry has a queue and playlists. The queue, as Kvinge explained to a user confused about the difference between the two, is meant to be a temporary list of songs to play in order. Playlists, on the other hand, are meant to persist, and the application is well designed for putting together playlists for every occasion. For those of us who miss crafting mixtapes, this is the next-best thing.

Users can manually add tracks from their collection to a playlist, save playlists for posterity, and so forth. Strawberry also has a smart playlist feature that can automatically generate playlists based on search criteria such as a song's rating, its genre, how long it has been since a song was played, and so on. The search terms can be combined to create a playlist, for example, of songs that are tagged as "Alternative", released between 1980 and 1989, and that have not been played in the past five days.

Sometimes, no matter how large one's music collection is, it's nice to let someone else handle the disc-jockey duties and hear some new music. Strawberry has built-in support (found in the "Radios" tab) for playing individual stations from two Internet radio station providers that offer a wide variety of music, Radio Paradise and SomaFM. It does not, however, support logging in to Radio Paradise and rating music, skipping tracks, etc.

There are, of course, many other Internet radio stations. Unfortunately, it's not immediately obvious how to add new stations, but it is possible. Users might rightly expect that there would be an "add new radio station" button or menu item but there is not; instead, users can add a station by selecting "Add Stream..." from the Playlist menu and providing the URL for the stream. This is a bit clunky, but it works. RadioBrowser is a good source for finding Internet stations by category, country, and more.

On occasion, one has to leave the computer—happily, Strawberry makes it easier to take music along for the ride. It has features for managing external music devices; in my case, Micro SD cards that I pop into my music player. As with the local music collection, Strawberry will scan and catalog the music on the external device; after that, users can copy over songs, albums, and playlists. It is also possible to configure Strawberry to transcode music for external devices; for example, if the local music collection is in FLAC format, it might be desirable to copy music over in a lossy format to save space.

The only complaint I really have with Strawberry is that it has little documentation. This is not a surprise, though, since the project is kept running by a single maintainer. Help is available via the forum, and Kvinge seems to be fairly active in responding to user questions. There is also a wiki with a bit of documentation; the FAQ is a good place to start when faced with common technical issues.

The lack of documentation is a minor problem; it is a music-management program and not rocket science, after all. Over the years I've tinkered with more music players and managers for Linux than I can recall. Strawberry is the one that I keep coming back to, because it is the best fit for local-music management.

apt install strawberry
strawberry # to create a new blank DB
strawberry-import-from-clementine