Strawberry
FreeA music player for people who still own their music files
An open-source player built around a local music collection. It manages large libraries, plays lossless formats including FLAC, APE, WavPack and DSF, edits tags, fetches cover art and lyrics, builds smart playlists, and handles CDs and internet radio. No account, and fully usable offline.
Why we picked it
Streaming subscriptions cover most people's listening, but not everyone: some have thousands of CDs they ripped themselves, purchased high-resolution lossless files, obscure recordings and live versions no service carries — or simply do not want what they listen to becoming analyzed data.
Strawberry is built for them. An actively developed fork of Clementine, 3,891 stars, GPL-3.0, focused on one job: managing and playing your own music files well.
What it does well:
- Large libraries stay fast. Tens of thousands of tracks still open and search instantly — something many modern players cannot manage, because they were designed around streaming.
- Broad format coverage: FLAC, ALAC, APE, WavPack, Opus, DSF/DSD and various tracker formats play without hunting down separate codecs.
- A complete tag editor. Bulk-edit artist, album, year and genre, pull correct metadata from MusicBrainz, and fetch cover art automatically — essential when tidying a pile of badly named old files.
- Smart playlists generated from rules such as "rated four stars or higher, not played in three months, under five minutes".
- Audio details handled properly: ReplayGain volume normalization so albums stop jumping in loudness, an equalizer, gapless playback, crossfading, and ALSA passthrough on Linux for bit-perfect output.
- Internet radio and podcasts, with optional Last.fm and ListenBrainz scrobbling.
To be clear about:
- It is not a streaming client. Spotify and Apple Music are not supported (early Clementine had some online service integrations, most of which died with the services). If you want your own music available on a phone anywhere, look at Navidrome — self-host a server and have the mobile app connect home.
- The interface is traditional: three panes, dense information, the classic desktop music player look rather than the large-artwork styling of streaming apps. People who like compact layouts find it efficient.
- You need to already have music files. It provides no content.
- On Windows the peers are foobar2000 (free, closed source, extremely light and customizable) and MusicBee (free, closed source, more modern interface); Strawberry's advantage is being open source across all three desktop platforms.
If your music is files on your own disk rather than a licence on someone's server, this is a dependable long-term choice.