Project update

jonas

I'll post this here as a general update to the Strawberry project. (I still intend to add ratings and smart playlists back, read until the end).

Thanks for all the positive feedback so far, and to the ones that have been donating money through PayPal.

I have been ill for the past 3 months or so. I had some back pain that didn't go away, and have been in a lot of pain. Basically my back collapsed in May. I had a hard time even standing up. It's a bit better now, but I still can't do much physical work without getting the pain back. I have been sick on and off from my day job for weeks.
I have something called "modic 1 changes" which is something the doctors know very little about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modic_changes

Anyway, as you have probably have seen, the development on Strawberry has not stopped because of this, it is, and have been in almost continuous development for the past 3-4 years. I make frequent releases almost every month. I have been concentrating on bugfixes and improvements to the existing codebase, which will always be my main priority. Bugs that can be reproduced and solved are fixed almost the same day they are reported. @glaubersm have reported lot's of bugs that have been helpful too, so I've fixed many bugs I did not immediately see myself.

These are some of the things that have been done in the past months (some of the biggest changes):

All the code has been renewed, and everything is now 100% compatible with Qt version 6. Which puts the whole project in a good position for the future since we now are both compatible with Qt 5 and 6. We probably need to do little, or no changes to make it work with the final release of Qt 6 in November.
We use our own copy of TagLib, where almost all changes from TagLib 2 are adapted, my own changes to TagLib has been manually merged with the official TagLib 2 branch, which was a huge job since I made my own changes to TabLib I could not just copy TagLib 2 over. I found that I had already done so many of the same changes that were in TagLib 2 that we might as well adapt the rest of it. (The TagLib project is currently without a maintainer, and have stalled, we more or less needs to maintain it ourself). This is probably the only library we use that is no longer in development upstream, so we need to continue to include our own copy. I have considered switching to a different library called tagparser: https://github.com/Martchus/tagparser that is in continuous development, but I think that would mean even more work.
A lot of the UI has been improved to use less fixed fonts and icons, this is so it works better with higher resolution and scaling. Some icon sizes can also be configured. This is probably where Strawberry could still be improved, because our UI is based on a 10 year old design. We will probably not want to change too much of the UI, because it is what users are familiar with, and for many users, the current design is why they use Strawberry or Clementine.
Strawberry probably has the best cover and lyric providers of any music player on Linux (Tidal has 1500x1500 and Deezer has 1000x1000 resolution covers), these have been improved even more. They have been improved so that matches are very accurate. For album covers for streaming where we can search some of the API's by artist and song title to get album results. They also have a score system so that the best result is always picked. For lyrics, many more providers have been added, we only had 1 before. We now have 6 lyric providers, with some of the biggest lyrics databases available such as Genius and Musixmatch. All of them are using API's except for Musixmatch. All are configurable in the settings. We can also easily add new providers that require OAuth based login.
Streaming support have been improved to work with covers, lyrics and scrobbling, the "add stream" option is also added to the menu. Strawberry now works much better with internet radios.
Most of the issues on macOS have been fixed, which means we can continue to make releases for macOS. There have been a ton of problems related to macOS so this has been a huge job, even when most issues have been minor, it has been a lot of work to get it to this point. This is one of the things I have spent a ridiculous amount of time on, mainly because I have not been familiar with macOS API's, objective C and python (and I don't have a mac, I'm am 100" linux only user). (and I have no personal interest in running it on macOS myself).
Automatic updating when there is a new version is functioning for macOS and Windows.
The analyzer problems has finally been fixed to work with all bit depths formats without affecting bit depth of the output.
Many other bug fixes and improvements which most of it can be seen in the changelogs.
Tidal works with OAuth, which is pretty cool, this means we can continue development on the Tidal support, and hopefully keep the Tidal support in the future too.

When things settle a bit in regard to bugfixing, I will probably look into completing ratings and smart playlists again since it's 2 of the most missed features from Amarok and Clementine. They require database schema updates which means we need to be extra careful as it can potentially more easily break something.
I wanted to make some changes to those features before I bring them back. The smart playlists code is large.
I have no interest in those features myself, but as Clementine is more or less abandoned I think it's necessary to have those 2 back since a lot of users want them. Once that's finished we can look into other features again, but right now the features in the current open issues are the only thing I have capacity to do. It is still possible to suggest and discuss new features on the forum, but having open issues on GitHub for features we don't have capacity to do anyway will just give false impression that something will be added. It is also impossible and unrealistic to do what everyone wants.

I hope everyone who uses Strawberry will consider becoming a GitHub sponsor on my profile. Even though some have been donating on Paypal, I am very thankful to those. There are still no sponsors which is a bit disappointing. Continuing donation through GitHub sponsors will help secure the project in the future, and it will encourage the continuing development of Strawberry, it also takes a lot of time to continue support for Strawberry through GitHub issues and on the Forum. It is possible to sponsor as low as 2 dollars per month which most could afford. So please consider it.
Link to sponsor page:
https://github.com/sponsors/jonaski

silver-sun

First, take care of your health. So sorry to hear about your medical issues. Your passionate and relentless pursuit of perfection with Strawberry has not been unnoticed. And this when you were not even feeling well! Above and beyond the call!

I have gotten so much joy out of using Strawberry since I installed it a few months ago. If development stopped right now, it would still be one of the best music players out there.

All best wishes for you to get well soon, or however long it takes.

Thank you for the wonderful Strawberry Music Player!!!

llucps

Hi,

Sorry to hear about your health problems, I hope you get better.. I always heard that back pain is one of the most painful and annoying issues someone can ever have.. take care of yourself honestly, health it's the most important thing.

Sorry for being late to the party, but I've just become an sponsor, I know is not much but I decided to support you on a regular bassis even with such small amount, it's all I can do for the moment. Your project is really important to me, Strawberry is basically along with Clementine (although it seems to be stalled) the only good and viable Subsonic desktop client for macOS, and I would like to continue using it for a long time

All the best,