I'm a bit surprised that this request is creating so much friction. This to me, is just a run of the mill "help me find a free download of this software" request that shows up all the time here.
I'm not comfortable trying to build this myself. I am happy to just use the inactive Clementine media player this is forked off of if people are really so offended by my request.
I totally understand why the dev wants to be paid, I'm just not going to be the one to do it.
Yeah I don't have an answer for the thing you're actually asking (sorry) but this is 100% a reasonable take and honestly I fully approve of their approach here. Strawberry is licensed under the GPL, it is libre software and can be packaged in any FOSS operating system without issue. This adds to the free software community. They are explicitly only selling to people who don't value free software enough to use a free operating system.
And to be clear, I can guarantee that no one loses sleep over piracy of their GPL software, otherwise it wouldn't be GPL. I see it more as a way for the devs to wash their hands of troubleshooting for operating systems they don't want to care about - anyone on windows/mac who cares enough about strawberry to pay gets listened to, but otherwise you've created an easy excuse for ignoring the extra work.
As an aside it's my preferred player on linux, good software.
Originally I just wanted to try a FOSS media player and found Clementine to be the most reliable when it came to importing music and reading the tags. This was especially true when grabbing old music files off an iPod then importing them.
When I realized clementine is basically dead, wanted to see how strawberry compared.
Side note, I enjoy the outdated aesthetic. 😋
I would probably use MediaMonkey if I was going to go the non FOSS route.
I think its reasonable that a one man dev team wants a bit of money for their time. They gave good reasons as to why and as others have said you could compile it yourself. I just don't know how and am a bit intimidated by the tutorial.
To me, personally, paying for this type of program when my use case is very casual, isn't worth it to me.
Anyone is free to build it themselves. Someone could even distribute their own build from the same source under a different name completely legally.
You could just as easily in the spirit of this community do it with the same name and code, same way they do it for cracked games. Don't tell me it's not done because there are security concerns, you have no way to tell if cracked games contain secret malware in them yet people still distribute and download those.
They bank on users being lazy and then pay for the convenience.
And also pirates to not outright rip them off, which seems to be working for some reason...
I don't think that's true, correct me if I am wrong though. There are still other requirements you have to follow for the GPL3 license if you wanted to distribute it legally.
I looked around a bit and couldn't find it… Here is a big list of Software sites, maybe some else has better luck. (Also couldn't find anything via DHT crawlers and Soulseek).
You could try runnig it via WSL, since the Linux version is free and up-to-date.
If you are planning to use it via WSL, you'll need to setup pulse audio server for audio and X server for GUI both of which ain't hard and you can access files on your windows system from the path something like "/mnt/d/music/".