@jonas Jonas: I complete understand, and this bug does not seem to be a strawberry bug. My son suggested I consult OpenAI Codex for a solution. It did not provide a solution, but did diagnose the problem and developed a kludgy workaround. Most of the following text is written by Codex:

The issue seems to be tied specifically to Strawberry being left in the Paused state under WSLg, if I swtich to another window or open Settings. If I Stop playback before changing settings, playback can be restarted normally. If I Pause playback, then either change settings or sometimes just switch away from Strawberry and come back, playback can become unresponsive.

While debugging, pactl sometimes showed Strawberry’s PulseAudio stream stuck/corked, and other times Strawberry had no active sink-input even though the app still thought it could resume. Plain GStreamer playback of the same MP3 worked when run outside Strawberry, so the strongest clue is that Strawberry/GStreamer’s paused pipeline does not survive some WSLg/PulseAudio state transition.

The workaround Codex developed for me is:

launch Strawberry with explicit WSLg-safe environment: QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb PULSE_SERVER=unix:/mnt/wslg/PulseServer XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/mnt/wslg/runtime-dir keep Strawberry output as pulsesink disable playbin3, crossfade/fade effects, loudness normalization, and Strawberry volume control run a small user service that watches Strawberry’s MPRIS state. If Strawberry stays paused for more than ~10 seconds, or if settings are saved while paused, it records the playback position, sends Stop, and then seeks back to the saved position when playback starts again.

This is definitely a workaround, not a real fix. The practical conclusion is: Stop is safe, but Pause is fragile under WSLg.

This makes Strawberry on WSLg usable for now, but it confirms the bug is around the paused playback state. I will submit a bug report to WSLg about this (yeah, Codex is helping me on that, too)

@jonas Just tried that. Db and backup are okay and not corrupted.

From what I've read/seen I think the issue wasn't corruption but just a bizarre mistimed save. I removed my primary music folder from the inclusion list so I could more easily compare other music folders in Strawberry, and after that was done I added it back. Bc it was added back it required a full rescan, so I cancelled the scan and enabled EBUR128 bc I might as well. In the playlists, removing the primary folder made every song disappear. At some point, maybe when I closed Strawberry prematurely or whatever, Strawberry saved the playlists to the DB, and since the missing tracks were still not in the database, saved blank entries into all the data cells, wiping any data. Or it happened some other bizarre way IDK.

TLDR (most of) the data was overwritten with empty tags because of a weird niche save mechanic.

So unless someone really involved in Strawberrys development knows how to use the collection_id data to reverse engineer the individual tracks the data is completely lost. C'est la vie.

Thanks for your suggestions. it seems to work now, but I don't remember what I did, sorry. At least most of the stuff I wanted to be transferred has been transferred. I haven't used the script, at least I think I haven't. (I'm sorry, my memory plays tricks on me sometimes).

@jonas I was able to file the ticket on the gstreamer-plugin-rs gitlab and get help about that. Is there any reason that the steps in the wiki don't mention the need to install the development libraries as part of the command steps for installing the plugin? Where can I contribute to the wiki? I couldn't find an option for that anywhere.

@silver-sun I've adjusted the headset volume and its helped. But the volume slider is directly connected to the application volume control so adjusting it on there adjusts the volume slider and vice versa. There is no other point on the chain besides those two. (I'm using pipewire for context)

@dick In the above described situation the replaygain setting in SB was on but there were no Replaygain tags in de HiRes files. No i've added replaygain tags to the files and they play ok now.

@jonarmst_303
Have you tried adding a directory with audio files to the collection in Tools / Settings / Collection? Does anything show up?

I believe this is normal, seeking isn't supported with Spotify.
Strawberry mainly has one developer me, so it's not possible for me to reply to everything, there are too many issues to reply to.

Look for Menu -> Tools -> Settings... -> Playlist -> Use alternating row colors

I too would be interested in TAK playback.
Any plans to add it to the roadmap?

@paul2berry
The played track history (clicking previous track button) will reset if you stop playback, or do you mean it's resetting while still playing?

Sounds good. I hate having to turn to VLC or other players to get features like this. I also see this (musical lyrics in .lrc) as the camel's nose in the tent for podcast transcripts in .vtt. Whether it is music (lyrics) or podcasts (transcripts), text is very important for the hard of hearing and for people like me, with excellent hearing for music but not-so-excellent listening for words in other languages. I am sure that my neighbors through the wall would like if I did not have to occasionally scrub back over the same five-second passage ten times.

I have the same problem. It can show up randomly but if I choose next in the playlist it will happen then. If I double-click the selected song it will resume. I use ALSA and have used both HW and PCM with no change between them.

I use Linux Mint Mate.