To follow up on my testing, I did not have good results setting Strawberry volume slider to 50 percent, if that, indeed, equates to -3 dB.
70 percent seemed better to my ears. Computer master volume remained at 100 percent. DAC is connected to my computer via USB.
Incidentally, on further reading about this topic, the term(s) used is "intersample peak clipping", or "intersample overs".
If you are using Strawberry in Linux I can probably help. You would need to install qt6ct, which is the Qt6 Configuration Tool, if it is not already installed in your system.
With this utility you can choose what themes, icons, fonts, etc., that you wish your Qt applications to follow. Strawberry is built using Qt6.
I use Linux Mint, which uses GTK as its graphical toolkit, so this is what I have to do, and it works very well. The app appears as "Qt6 Settings" in my application menu.
If your Strawberry is installed as a Flatpak, I don't think the above method would work. I use Strawberry installed as a system package.
If you are using Windows or Mac, sorry, I don't have any advice. Good luck!
@rlkeeney Thank you. I'll experiment with the 50 percent value. I actually haven't noticed any audible artifacts on my system. This is more out of curiosity, to see if I notice any difference.
It is my understanding that when playing music files in Strawberry from a computer through an external DAC (using ALSA), bit-perfect output requires both the computer volume and payer volume to be set at 100 percent. The music volume is then controlled by the system components; in my case, a preamp.
There are claims that at 100 percent (software) volume, some clipping may occasionally occur, due to the behavior of the DAC reconstruction filters.
It is suggested to try reducing the (software) volume -3 dB. (This may vary, but is a good place to start.) This is a compromise, of course, but if it works it may actually sound better; so it is claimed.
Strawberry's volume setting indicates percentage, not dBs.. So what would be the equivalent percentage value to achieve -3 dB reduction?
I don't believe such a guide exists, at least not on the Strawberry Wiki.
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.
I prefer to have Strawberry use only embedded artwork for the collection. And for the most part, it works very well. Where issues arise is when the album's metadata contains multiple album covers.
I will occasionally include an alternate cover when tagging the songs. For example, sometimes the CD cover is different than the original release that I am familiar with, so I will use the original cover, but include the actual cover in the tags as an alternative.
From my observations in the tag editor, Kid3-qt, the songs will use the first cover listed, i.e., "1 of 2", as the embedded cover. (This is the cover that is shown in the thumbnails of my file manager.) This is also the behavior in iTunes, with which I am long familiar.
Strawberry, however, appears to display the embedded cover with the largest file size, regardless if it is listed as "1" or "2" in the tag editor, so sometimes the album shows up with the "wrong" cover.
I would like Strawberry to force the use of embedded covers, and to use "Cover 1" by default.
Since Strawberry does not appear to support multiple covers in the built-in editor, I'm not sure if this is a bug report or a feature request.
P.S. -- My "Save Playlist" dialog is set to save as .pls format. If you click on the button at the lower right, just above the "Cancel" and "Save" buttons, you can choose what playlist file type you want. I noticed you were working with m3u, which is one of the options.
There is a toolbar at the top of the playlist pane. Look for "Save Playlist" and "Load Playlist". Clicking "Save Playlist" will allow you to save the playlist as a .pls file to whatever folder you choose. When you want to call up that particular playlist, you can click "Load Playlist". Select the playlist you saved previously and it will open in a new tab on the right of the tab row. (Note: Focus does not automatically jump to the newly opened playlist; you have to select it.)
It appears to retain the original track order. If you alter the playlist, just save it again and overwrite the previous one; or give it a different name and save it separately. Dynamic updating, I don't believe is possible in Strawberry.
OK, that's a lot to chew on, and I will declare at the outset that I don't have an answer to your problem, but FWIW, here are some thoughts.
First of all, Strawberry only displays certain tags -- the list you see when you right click on the column headers. It is only capable of displaying one comment per song, so I doubt multiple comments will work. Perhaps the "0" value displayed is a result of Strawberry trying to do something it can't. (just a guess).
I question the attempt to use Strawberry to organize podcasts. Strawberry, I believe, is strictly a player and organizer for music files. The podcasts you download may come with tags that are appropriate for podcast apps, but probably not for Strawberry. "Description", I think, is a tag that is used with podcasts, but Strawberry does not even display that tag.
For my podcasts, I use a separate podcast app, like Kasts, and prior to that, I used Clementine (for podcasts only) after I had moved on to Strawberry for music files. One thing nice about Clementine is that it labels the downloaded podcast files with the date of release. Kasts does not include the date in the file name. To be clear here, I am talking about the file names in the file manager; not within the actual podcast app.
The downside of using a podcast app, especially if you download episodes, is that if you want to move the podcast files out of their respective apps, all the organization provided by the apps' databases is lost. So, I can see why one might like to use a music player to organize them. But to do that, the podcasts need to be tagged just like songs, and that might be tedious to do.
If you are seeing iTunSMPB tags, that tells me these files originated from Apple. That tag is for gapless playback, and at least some newer Strawberry installations, including mine, are having problems with that tag. (At the end of a song, it will repeat a snippet of music before moving to the next track.) I wound up just deleting the iTunSMPB tags, which are of no use to Strawberry. If you have a need to use iTunes and Strawberry with the same files, I don't know what to tell you. I should state here that my files are m4a (AAC) files. Not sure if there are problems with mp3 files.
As to why the comments field is "pulling" from the iTunSMPB info, I haven't got a clue. That is strange.
I hope you find something useful in the ramble above. But I really think that a lot could be solved by using a separate app for podcasts. Good luck!
This is just a guess, but I'm wondering if your artwork from iTunes is stored in an iTunes artwork database; readable by your iPod, but not something that Strawberry can read. I think that if the artwork was embedded in the files, you might be able to see it.
As I recall, you can save artwork a couple of different ways in iTunes. I have always preferred to embed the artwork, where it becomes a part of the metadata, and travels along with the audio file wherever it goes. Takes a bit more storage space, however.
Sorry, I can't test this right now, as I don't have access to an iPod.
I agree, your expected behavior would be the perfect way. But since this is an operation that's not a day-to-day thing, how about a kludgy workaround? Organize your songs alphabetically, and transfer in several smaller batches, based on letters of the alphabet, e.g., A-F, etc.
I would have to do some experimenting to see how compilations are affected, but I am wondering what type of sound files you are dealing with.
When I was playing around with "original year", I noticed that it did not work with mp4 type files, such as those Apple uses (ALAC as well). FLAC seems to support that tag just fine.
I don't know if this is a Strawberry issue, or something inherent in mp4.
I wish I has something more helpful to add, but I figured I'd at least share the little experience I do have with the "year"/"original year" tags.
Unfortunately, on Ubuntu 22.04 or Linux Mint 21.3 (based on Ubuntu 22.04), I don't believe it is possible. See this in the Wiki:
Strawberry does not respect Qt style, KDE theme or icons on Linux.
Strawberry is built with Qt6, and needs qt6ct (Qt 6 Settings) installed in order to make changes to the theme (on Ubuntu based distros). The above distros ship with qt5ct (Qt 5 Settings), but that only works on Qt apps that were written with Qt5.
Qt6ct won't build on Ubuntu 22.04 because it lacks some dependencies, so we're out of luck for now. I think the next versions of Ubuntu (and Linux Mint) will have qt6ct in the repository.
I have set up a dedicated laptop just for music, with Linux Mint LMDE6 (based on Debian 12) which has a slightly newer package base, and does, indeed, include qt6ct. It worked well to achieve a dark mode, as well as certain fonts and icons that I desired.
I would love to be proved wrong about this, but I think we're just going to have to be patient -- as long as we are on the LTS versions of Ubuntu and Mint.
If anyone has had success compiling qt6ct on Ubuntu 22.04, please share how you did it!
A few things to try:
• Create a small test collection somewhere in your home directory, e.g., ~/Music. Point Strawberry to that instead of the SSD, and see if the behavior is the same. That would rule out issues with the external SSD.
• In Strawberry Tools > Settings > Collection, uncheck "Update the collection when Strawberry Starts" and "Monitor the Collection for changes" to see if that has any effect.
• Try uninstalling and reinstalling Strawberry. Perhaps even go as far as deleting ~/.config/strawberry and ~/.local/share/strawberry directories before reinstall.
(That is heavy handed, and you will lose all your settings. No warranty here! Backup first!)
• If you are not averse to flatpaks, there appears to be a flatpak version of Strawberry available. If the regular Ubuntu PPA or .deb package versions don't work, you might try the flatpak.
Disclaimer: That's all I can think of. I'm still on the Linux learning curve myself, so, not an expert by any means. But the above steps would be what I would try.
Good luck.
@sotos666
Perhaps enable "Monitor the collection for changes" in the settings? I see it is not checked in your screenshot. This is just a guess, though.
I have chosen to go the traditional route of replaygain tags, as that is what I had been using before I started with Strawberry. So I don't have a lot of experience with the EBU R 128 feature.
Just a point of clarification, as was pointed out in a previous post, the EBU R 128 system, as it is applied in Strawberry, does not actually write tags, but rather places the info in the Strawberry database. All the same, the info should be incorporated into the player, as you have stated.
I hope it's as simple as checking the box. Good luck!
@PeterB
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE 6) seems to do the trick. That version of Linux Mint actually has qt6ct in the software channel, although an older version, 0.7-3. I installed your newer version, 0.9-2, and it seems to work fine for the most part.
Interestingly, it would not allow me to set the font as Ubuntu Regular; instead insisting on Ubuntu Light Italic. It allowed me to use Noto Sans, which is close enough. But any insight on that font issue would be appreciated.
Thanks again for helping me out with this!
@PeterB
Hey, I just checked to see what version of libqt6core6 is included in Debian 12 "Bookworm" and it looks like it's version 6.4.2 (which would satisfy the qt6ct dependency.
I'm going to install Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) on a test machine and see what happens. LMDE (based on Debian 12) at this point is slightly ahead of the Ubuntu 22.04 base for regular Mint.
It's been my plan to set up a dedicated laptop for my music listening room, to stream FLAC and such. LMDE would be fine for that. Fingers crossed!
@PeterB
Thanks for the reply!
Close, but no cigar! The installer wants the dependency, libqt6core6, to be (>=6.3.0), but Linux Mint 21.3 only has libqt6core6 6.2.4.
Maybe Linux Mint 22 will be up to the task. I appreciate the work you're doing, though. I'll bet it's helping out a lot of folks.
I run Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon, and I miss being able to use the Qt 5 Settings utility to customize Strawberry. I am aware of the explanation in the wiki, which states that Strawberry uses Qt 6 now, so that Qt 5 configuration is not possible anymore.
However, the wiki states that "Once a Qt 6 release of KDE is ready this won't be a problem anymore." Well, I believe that has finally happened, but I still see no way to set up qt6ct (Qt 6 Configuration Tool) in Linux Mint.
I imagine Qt 6 will eventually find its way into the Mint repositories, but when might this actually happen?
Is there any way at all to get Qt 6 configuration into the current version of Linux Mint -- a flatpak, perhaps? Or do I just have to be patient?