Strawberry Music Player Review: Great Amarok 1.4 Incarnation

Sweet Nostalgia

I've been using Linux desktop as my main OS since 2007. There were sweet and fun memories about how I struggled to learn and use Linux Desktop as my daily system.

I've tried several Linux distros, desktop environments and applications. One of my favorite application was called Amarok 1.4. It was a great music player with simple UI but came with the most complete UX you can find in a music player. Amarok 1.4 was a part of KDE sofware version 3.5.x.

Unfortunately, when KDE turned to version 4.x branch, Amarok has been changed. Many Amarok fans includes me, are not really happy with the direction. We are still fond of that beautiful Amarok 1.4 and from that point, I switch to Audacious music player.

Thankfully, there are kind hearted developers who finally forked Amarok 1.4 to a newer Qt4 application, called Clementine. It is a big news so that several distros include Clementine as their main music player (like OpenMandriva).

Time goes on, now we are in the KDE Plasma 5x era (Qt6 and KDE 6 will arrive soon as well). Many KDE apps have successfully been transitioned to Qt5 seamlessly.

Along with Qt5 and KDE Plasma 5 arrival, there is a new Clementine fork called Strawberry Music Player. It inherits Amarok 1.4 UI but built on newer Qt5 technology, with some beautiful polishments.

Installation

There is a PPA repository to install Strawberry Music Player to your Ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonaski/strawberry
sudo apt update

sudo apt install strawberry

User Interface

As a Clementine fork, Strawberry inherits the Amarok 1.4 beauty, built on modern Qt5 technology. There are also polishments and some few new beautiful features added.

The most beautiful feature is called Context. It shows the song lyrics with clean view you can read. There is also Radios where you can listen to free online radio streaming services. The rest are just similar to those on Clementine and Amarok 1.4.

Conclusion

Open source software is a great or maybe the greatest concept of software distribution. It gives people an ability to view, learn, modify and improve an open source software. Strawberry Music Player is a beautiful example how an old, abandoned application has been kept alive and improved by its user base. It indeed brings me back a fun, from the time where you have to struggle to make your WiFi card works on Linux Desktop.

Long live open source software !

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