Amarok and Strawberry a comparison

Introduction

A few years back I wrote an article here comparing amarok and clementine, two media players. Since then amarok development seemed to have stalled and strawberry was more active so I moved to that application. Recently development has been happening again with amarok and version 3.0 has just been released. So here's a rewrite of the older article comparing amarok and strawberry. I'm a long term user of Amarok the KDE media player - for probably 10+ years. I've now got Amarok to run successfully and thought I'd put down my comparison of pros and cons of both. Below, for each, I'm giving the pros (at least for me!).

Amarok

I'm using nightly build for Kubuntu the ppa version from Joe Yasi version KF5 2.9.71 but the 3.0 release is available here

• Can order by date in collection view with more recent at top - Strawberry date ordering only appears to be from oldest /undated with the newest right down at the bottom and those are probably the ones you want to highlight/listen.
• Filters on collection - history of filters available via pulldown and editable using a user friendly form. Collection filter functionality is vastly superior and more friendly, there's a dialog with dragging from various options related to tracks, and there's a history of previous filters in that session. Strawberry just gives you the ability to type a filter.
• Add ons - e.g. viewing the rest of the album contents automatically while listening to one track.
• Track info in wikipedia - and selectable via various options, artist, composer etc; links are clickable in case you want to browse. No wikipedia in strawberry. You can even, now, pause the wikipedia display so that the whole article can be read even if the track is finished.
• Scripts are available!
• Dynamic lists remain tied to the selection - if you change it the selection changes. In Strawberry it appears to be a snapshot of the time you invoked it, and having turned off dynamic selection in a tracklist, there's no clear way of turning it back on.
• Tracks are named as such rather than the genre specific term of (wince) "songs" - yes I know that's what certain big music suppliers use!
• Albums can be played in order as part of a dynamic playlist, It's just about possible in Strawberry but only very hackily.
• The view of the collection is a lot more structured, click on an album and there's a secondary level showing the artist, in my mainly "classical" collection that's very useful.
• Amarok starts up far more quickly than Strawberry unless you remember to close Strawberry without the collection showing in the sidebar (if not it appears to do a lot of loading of data - album covers I assume).
• You can exclude subdirectories from the collection, with strawberry if you select a directory there's no possibility of excluding an area under that.
• You can use the mouse wheel to zoom into the album cover - from Display Cover - with Strawberry you can only view the cover at actual size.
• A couple of cons (and see the ogg format comment below) con - sometimes when starting up Amarok, the volume is set to zero - clearly not just me - see this report
• If you look carefully at the above screenshot and the dynamic playlist contraints, you'll see a very large number (supposed to be in seconds)specified for the maximum length, this value is actually treated as milliseconds, this bug is expected to be fixed soon!

Strawberry

Version 1.0.23

• Multiple playlists can be visible and edited while another is being played.
• Wide selection of track data can be shown in the playlist (screenshot!). I find it useful to show the last played time so that, for instance, you can see where you've played to in the list if you've clicked elsewhere in the list.
• Huge playlists are handled well.
• Retrieval of album covers is far better.
• Playing ogg format works (well it 'works' for amarok but the track is frequently not marked as played)
• Playing CDs works without having to rip them. In amarok it works to an extent though the whole cd is seen as a single track.
• While building a dynamic list you get a preview of what is going to be chosen with your current options, with Amarok you do it in the dark and only when using it do you find you've done something wrong (and what is wrong??!!).
• Showing lyrics seems to work a lot better than Amarok, though it's something I rarely use.
• "Right" click on a track and there are a lot more options than in Amarok (eg search for artist) - and there's edit tag directly!
• Auto completion of tags when editing from existing data - good in Strawberry, this used to work with Amarok but currently doesn't - I guess this will eventually be rectified.
• The wonderful "complete tags automatically" - it usually works even with some of my more obscure listening!
• Importing of last.fm stats works. In amarok I lost all the "last played" and "playcount" data from before my upgrade to Ubuntu 20.10 - which is when I had to migrate to the new Amarok.
• Cue files work!
• And a couple of cons- if you have a playlist filter, you can't see the "smart playlist" option!
• Spotify appears to be available - but the plug in is not installable and causes an instant crash! I believe that fixing this is in progress.
• You can't create a smart playlist using "file format", this works in Amarok, and for Strawberry using file name contains doesn't appear to work at all.??
• Filtering the collection by typing in the textbox has a tendency to crash the player, when I remember I select to only display the tracks added this week, typing my filtering string and then changing the selection to all tracks which seems to avoid the bug.