I like the player a lot but the pricing is wild.

Whatever the cross fade duration Is set in the preferences, I'm under the impression that it doesn't matter. For example, I set it to 500 ms to have a very short transition but the cross fade start 1 or 2 seconds before the actual end of the track.
I have the same issue on both Linux and Windows.
Could it be a backend issue ?

Thanks,

I can offer a few basic suggestions for a beginner.

Strawberry plays music in playlists. No matter what the source of the song, it will always open in a playlist. Playlist management is too lengthy to get into here, but you can create, label, save and "favorite" playlists.

Strawberry can play from any folder on your computer by selecting "Files" in the sidebar.

If you go a step further and point Strawberry to a folder in Settings > Collection, it will show the songs as a "library" when selecting "Collection" in the sidebar.

I would hold off with using anything that says "Organzie Files" at first. (There are naming and sorting options that you may want to consider.)

Go through all the settings, slowly and methodically. Make a note of your changes so you can revert if necessary.

Use the tool-tip notes by hovering your cursor over icons, etc.

And use your right click to display the many options available.

• Edit all properties of a file from a right click (album art added, genres, years, Mood, Occasion) or by editing an adjacent window pane with all properties.
• Browse files by Genre or other meta-data (Mood, Occassion)
• A more unitary interface that doesn't force songs to be in the collection before you edit album art, mass assign Genres, Moods, Occassions to many songs. The current interface makes me go to lots of different places which is very inefficient. Right now when I'm auditing new songs, there's no way to prepare it easily with all the meta-data I want to assign to it.
• No support for a master list of Genres, Moods, Occassions that can be shared between a laptop and a desktop computer used to store the master song repository.
• etc...

There's a few dozen things I want but I'm torn whether to donate before the features are in. I'd like to have all the basic functions needed for large collections then I can donate to keep it running on future versions of Linux. Normally I buy software that already has the features already. What is the size of a donation needed to get me some of the features I want?

So ignore that.

But I like this, having them in Sort Order, as that's how I also keep my file collection folder names.

I'm aware of an issue with the playlist row colors on Windows using the windows11 style. You can change the style in Settings / Apperance / Style, set the style to windowsvista, or turn of the alternating row colors like already suggested.

Flatpak is not just a version, it's a completely different packaging system on it's own which makes strawberry run in a sandbox environment, all features might not work and there might be restrictions such as permissions. I do not recommend it.
Linux Mint 22.1 is compatible with Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble), so you can use the PPA package repository (https://launchpad.net/~jonaski/+archive/ubuntu/strawberry) to get updates.

There isn't a sync with mobiles (where does it say that?), but you can manually copy or delete songs from a mobile phones supporting the MTP protocol. If you go on the the devices tab and double click to connect it, then you can go on the collection tab, right click on songs and select "Copy to device". In the the device tab you can delete songs by right clicking.

There isn't any help documents.

This is not a bug. It's just about information that is not on the github page and not on the wiki page. I didn't manage to download it on Windows 11, so I installed WSL, I installed Almalinux.
I will install Strawberry on Almalinux 9 Cli OS. I don't know if Strawberry is available in the store. I can't open the GUI store because it's Cli. I want to install it (not compile) but I don't know the installation code.
"sudo dnf install strawberry" Is it true?
There is no information about this on your github page and wiki page. Can you add the information?

And

It's listed as free on Alternativeto. The download page asks for a "tip". Is it paid for Windows? Is the information in Alternativeto wrong? When I select free and Windows from the filters, Strawberry is listed. Should Alternativeto be corrected?
Free for Windows or $20?
If it is free, I couldn't find where and how to download it. Can you help me?

Expected behavior
If it is paid, the filter in alternativeto should be edited.
If it is free, it should be explained how and where we can download it.

It's $5 a/month sponsorship or $20 for one version, it's explained on the website: https://strawberrymusicplayer.org/#download
Since we have nothing to do with AlternativeTo, you need to report it there, but "Free" can also refer to "Free Software" as in freedom, not cost.

As an example I often use XSPF-playlists for homemade lists of radiostations and use this field for the station-name because other fields (title, album...) are overwritten by the actually played music-title so while listening, the station-name is no more visible.

For newer testers:

When this has happened, Strawberry was not the active window; it had been some time without user interaction. The media files of the stopped tracks were both flac and mp3. I'll report if I find more info.

By the way, thanks also for fixing the UTF-8 encoding.