Posts made by silver-sun

Alas, Strawberry, at its very essence, is a playlist player. I assume you would like to play tracks from the Collection list directly, as you could in MusicBee.. I don't think that is possible.

I also miss the ability to play directly from the collection, as I was able to do when I used iTunes, and later, MusicBee. But Strawberry has so much else going for it, I just adapt.

What I do is create a playlist called "Play from Collection", that I keep at the left end of the playlist tabs. The songs/albums pop into that playlist when I double click them in the collection list, and I just wipe them out with the "Clear Playlist" button when I'm done. A little cumbersome, but it gets the job done.

It's sort of like when moving from one operating system to another, e.g., Mac to Linux. You can achieve much the same results, but the workflow might have to change.

One more thing... It might be a good idea to test with a small batch of files first, rather than the whole collection. Then, check things out in Strawberry and your file manager, to see if everything is organized as you desired.

Before you do anything, I recommend you have a good backup of your collection folder -- just in case you overlooked something.

I don't use the "Organize files" option myself (for reasons I won't go into here), but I believe you would select the files you want to organize, in either the Collection pane, or a playlist -- right click on the selected files and click "Organize files" in the menu that appears.

In the resulting window (which you have apparently already seen) select your naming options. Also, pay attention to the "Destination" and "After copying" options. Then click "OK". Progress should show in the lower part of Strawberry, under the play buttons.

The files you want to organize will be in the list in the lower section of the "Organize files" window.

Caution: If you are keeping your existing collection folder, and you don't choose "delete the original files", you will wind up with duplicates.

Good luck and let me know how it turned out.

I don't have an answer for you, but your post got me curious about how my Strawberry was handling this. I rarely use the sort columns feature, so I hadn't noticed it.

But, yes, my Strawberry, (1.2.23) has the same behavior as yours, in the playlist columns. I am using Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon.

I also run an older version of Linux Mint 21.3 on another computer, and use an older version of Strawberry (1.0.23) from the package manager. There, the behavior in the playlist columns is what you would expect, ignoring articles like "the" in artist names, and sorting The Beatles as under "B", not "T".

That older version of Strawberry doesn't even have the "Skip leading articles..." options, but everything works fine.

To be fair, the options you referenced are under "Collection" in settings, but one would expect the same behavior in playlists.

@toastman Strawberry Version 1.2.22, released a couple of days ago, now has a dark mode preset built in, as well as the ability to tweak the color palette. It's in Settings > Appearance. Nice!

I still use qt6ct (Qt6 Configuration Tool), as it offers the ability to change fonts, icons, etc., in addition to theme colors. But, if all you're looking for is a dark mode, the new option might be enough.

@athoopen Great! Glad you solved it!

@athoopen I am on Linux, and have used DB Browser for SQLite, but only in the most rudimentary manner; and not even for Strawberry's database. So, at this point, you know as much as me.

Back up everything before you go poking around. My previous mention of editing the database was a question, not a statement. So I'm not even sure that is the correct path. It seems like it might be. Your call.

Jonas is right about losing playlists, etc., if you use my heavy handed approach.

If you have not already done so, I would suggest you back up your important playlists, by saving them to disc (not just assigning a "favorites" star).. Easy to do in Strawberry. If your directory path remained the same after a "nuke and pave" approach, I think they would still be valid, but I'm not 100 percent sure. Other metadata, like ratings, might be lost though. Back up!

@jonas Ahh, too big a hammer, I guess! I didn't think of that. Thank you for the caveat.

What would the solution be, then? Editing the database? That might be beyond the skill level of many users.

Try this:
Tools > Settings > Collection

Remove your source folder (Under, "These folders will be scanned for music to make up your collection")

Click "OK". Close Strawberry.

Open Strawberry. Collection should now be empty, and you can add the folder back in. Allow Strawberry to fully scan the folder.

@toastman Hmm... Exactly the same system that I am using (Cinnamon desktop, BTW). Dark mode should work if you set the color scheme in Qt6 Settings to "darker", as I described in my original reply. Sorry, that's all I've got.

What is your distro and version? What version of Strawberry?

Your system will need to support Qt6 in order to display a dark mode (using qt6ct (Qt6 Settings). If it is still using Qt5 you will not be able to achieve dark mode -- not with the current version of Strawberry.

This is my experience on Linux Mint, anyway. Linux Mint 21 only supported Qt5, and I could not use dark mode with Strawberry versions built with Qt6. Once I upgraded to Linux Mint 22, Qt6 was supported, and by using Qt6 Settings to select Palette> Custom > "darker" -- dark mode works.

The "Styles" setting in Strawberry doesn't seem to have anything do do with dark vs. light mode. It's qt6ct that does the heavy lifting with theme changes.

Unless there is something wrong with your system, all the functionality you referenced exists in Strawberry.

To shuffle a playlist, right click on the playlist and select "Shuffle playlist", or press Ctrl+H. The shuffle buttons are only for setting the actual playback behavior.

To jump to the currently playing track, press Ctrl+J. You can also select this in Menu > Playlist.

You found the star. Not sure why this was not evident. Maybe something with your theme, making the icon hard to see?

Use your hover tooltips to get useful info. Also, right click menus have many, many options. And explore keyboard shortcuts. They can be handy.

Finally, a suggestion -- When you post, try not to let it devolve into a rant right off the bat. Tighten up your writing; less stream of consciousness. That was a formidable wall of text.

Hope you get things sorted and can enjoy Strawberry. It's a great application! Good luck!

@silver-sun I wouldn't think you'd need to install anything ALSA related. ALSA is part of the Linux kernel, pretty deeply integrated with the system. I use ALSA to output to my DAC, and I recall a time or two having to restart the system to get everything talking to everything else. So the only thing I can think of here is reboot the system (if you haven't done so already).

Sorry, I can't really interpret the logs, but here's what I would suggest.

In Settings > Backend, try selecting a different output; perhaps ALSA (with the PCM plugin). This way, you could get PulseAudio out the of loop for testing.

Make sure all your GStreamer packages are up to date.

If you are using Ubuntu solely for the purpose of running Strawberry, consider trying another distro (I like Linux Mint) to see if that helps.

I think the general trend in Linux audio these days is headed toward Pipewire, rather than PulseAudio. If you have the option, try that.

I'll confess, I'm kind of "spitballing" here, but hopefully there may be something that points you in the right direction. Good luck!

@DrBrightside Sorry -- that I couldn't tell you. Your pay grade is obviously higher than mine. I have used DB Browser a few times to make simple changes, but you're really in the weeds. I hope the backup database works.

I'm pretty sure the volume slider behavior is hard coded. Is there no point down the chain, i.e., computer master volume, system preamp, powered speaker volume, etc., where you could tweak the volume?

If you are using Linux, the database can be viewed with DB Browser for SQlite, which should be in the repository (It is on Linux Mint.). It's pretty daunting, so edit with caution.

What I would try first is to use the database backup file, 'strawberry.db.bak', found in ~/.local/share/strawberry/strawberry. If that was made before your debacle, you might have a chance of restoring your playlists.

Rename your corrupted db file to strawberry.db_old. Make a copy of the .bak file and rename it to strawberry.db, and give it a go. Good luck.

I'm pretty sure that Strawberry sorts by metadata. A song needs a track number, independent of the file name. The suggestion of renaming files numerically is a good idea. Organizing your album folders alphabetically, by song name, runs counter to the way albums are presented -- which is numerically, by track number.

Right click on a song and select "Edit track information". There should be a number in the "Track" field at the right. Don't change anything yet, until you figure out the root of your problem, but if there is no number, that might be of concern.

Hope that helps.

Some time ago I created a custom icon set, per instructions in the wiki, using .png icons. I would like to create a new set using .svg icons if possible.

It looks like Strawberry can handle .svg icons for some portions of the application, as I select "Use system theme icons" in the "Appearance" settings -- and my system uses Papirus-Dark, which has .svg icons. The sidebar, however, persists in using the original Strawberry icons.

Using the QT configuration tool (qt6ct), I am able to make my Strawberry look pretty nice in Linux Mint, but it won't do anything with the sidebar, and the stock Strawberry icons look so old and dated. Hence, my plans for a full alternative icon set.

So, would I be wasting my time by creating a .svg icon set? And if I can't use .svg, are there any plans to support .svg fully in the future?

I find that the best way to handle this is to use the "Album Artist" tag.

For albums that don't have the exact same artist name for every song, (but are not "Various Artists" compilation albums) put the name of the primary artist there.

Then, in the "Group By" setting, select one of the options that sorts by "Album Artist". It seems that with this configuration, albums that don't have an "Album Artist" entry will still be sorted by "Artist".

While one could use the "Album Artist" tag for all albums, I only use it for exceptions, like the example given in the original post.

Side Note (regarding compilations, aka "Various Artists":

For compilations, while some prefer to use "Various Artists" as the "Album Artist" entry, I prefer to check the "Compilation" checkbox instead, and leave "Album Artist" blank. Strawberry honors that tag, and will create a "Various Artists" heading in the library.

This is a hold-over from my years of experience with iTunes, which uses that "Compilation" tag. This may not be a universal solution, but in Strawberry, at least, it works for me.