What Is Strawberry Music Player and What Can You Do With It?
Strawberry Music Player is a free, cross-platform music player and music collection organizer for Linux, macOS, and Windows, aimed at music collectors and audiophiles. If you have a local digital music library you want to play, tag, and organize — or you want to stream radio and Subsonic-compatible servers — Strawberry is built for that. It is free software released under the GPL, written in C++ with the Qt framework and GStreamer, and is a fork of Clementine.
What Strawberry can do
The feature set centers on managing a local collection and getting clean audio out of it:
- Play and organize music — supports WAV, FLAC, WavPack, Ogg Vorbis, Speex, MPC, TrueAudio, AIFF, MP4, MP3, ASF, and Monkey's Audio.
- Playlist management — playlists in multiple formats, plus smart and dynamic playlists that update based on rules.
- Tag editing — edit tags on audio files directly, and automatically retrieve tags from MusicBrainz.
- Album art and lyrics — cover art pulled from Last.fm, MusicBrainz, Discogs, Musixmatch, Deezer, Tidal, and Spotify; lyrics from multiple sources.
- Audio tools — audio analyzer, audio equalizer, and advanced audio output and device configuration for bit-perfect playback on Linux.
- Scrobbling — support for Last.fm and ListenBrainz.
- Streaming — support for Subsonic-compatible servers, plus radio streaming.
- Device transfer — move music to mass-storage USB players, MTP-compatible devices, and iPod Nano/Classic.
- Audio CD playback — with a platform caveat noted below.
- Native desktop notifications.
Platform caveats worth knowing before you install
Two limitations come directly from the project's own notes:
- Audio CD and device support is not available on Windows. If CD ripping/playback or syncing to portable players is central to your workflow, Windows is not the right platform for those tasks in Strawberry.
- Only older iPod models work. If you rely on a newer iPod or iPhone-style device, don't expect that sync path to function.
Linux is where the deepest audio configuration lives — the bit-perfect playback and advanced output/device settings are described specifically for Linux.
Who it fits, and who it doesn't
| Your situation | Strawberry is a good fit? |
|---|---|
| You keep a large local library of FLAC, MP3, WavPack, etc. | Yes — format coverage and tag editing are core |
| You want bit-perfect output on Linux | Yes — this is an explicit design goal |
| You scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz | Yes — built-in scrobbler |
| You stream from a Subsonic-compatible server | Yes — supported |
| You want to sync to an iPod | Only older Nano/Classic models |
| You're on Windows and need CD or device support | No — not available on Windows |
| You mainly want a streaming-service client | Not the target — it's a collection organizer first |
How it's funded and maintained
Strawberry is free software and depends on donations. The project states that most development is done by one person, and that maintaining the app, services, releases, and bug handling is time-consuming. Sponsorship options listed are Patreon, GitHub, Ko-fi, and PayPal, with monthly donations through Patreon, Ko-fi, or GitHub preferred and one-time PayPal donations also possible. The source code is available on GitHub.
Getting started
Downloads are available from the project's Downloads page for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Once installed, the practical first steps are to point it at your music folders, let it index the collection, then use tag editing and MusicBrainz lookups to clean up metadata, and configure your audio output device if you're on Linux and want bit-perfect playback.