Additional support for variable playback speed
Hello,
I found that there have already been feature suggestions regarding variable playback speed, and I would like to add my support and another use case for this functionality.
First of all, thank you for developing and maintaining Strawberry. It has become my primary audio player on Linux because it offers a combination of features that I have not found together in other players:
folder-based browsing instead of relying exclusively on MP3 tags,
unlimited and freely configurable playlists,
an intuitive and efficient user interface,
integration with streaming services,
excellent handling of large local audio collections.
But there is only one feature I regularly miss: variable playback speed.
I do not only use Strawberry for music, but also for spoken-word content such as guided meditations, podcasts, lectures, audiobooks, and language-learning material. Some recordings are spoken quite quickly, and being able to slow them down slightly (for example to 0.8×–0.9×) while keeping the original pitch would be extremely useful.
Since Strawberry already uses GStreamer, I assume the underlying multimedia framework may already provide some of the necessary building blocks. Possible approaches might include GStreamer's playback rate handling or elements such as scaletempo for preserving pitch during speed changes. Of course, the actual implementation choice would be up to the developers or contributors.
Even a simple implementation would already be very valuable, for example:
a few predefined playback speeds (0.75×, 0.8×, 0.9×, 1.0×, 1.25×, 1.5×),
optionally remembering the selected speed,
and keeping the setting available for playlists containing spoken-word material.
I understand that Strawberry is a community-driven project with limited developer resources, and this is not meant as a demand or expectation. I just wanted to add another concrete use case and show that this feature would make Strawberry even more useful beyond traditional music playback.
In my opinion, playback speed control has become a standard feature expected from modern audio players. Adding it would make Strawberry one of the few Linux audio players that can handle both music libraries and spoken-word content equally well.
Thank you again for all the work you put into Strawberry.
