How to play a folders worth of music/video in VLC media player

Question

In VLC media player, I can use vlc -LZ <file 1> <file 2> <file 3> for example to play various files on repeat and shuffled. Is it possible to specify a whole directory and play all the music within the folder and it's subfolders?

Say I am hosting a party and have a folder with "Party Music", how would I play all the music from that folder in a loop and repeating the whole playlist?

Solution 1

By commandline, with recent versions, it should work with your command options and the name of the directory(ies) instead of the files:

vlc --LZ  "Party Music"

If your path includes spaces you need to include it between "".
Only if you modified the default options you may need to add also --playlist-autostart.
The option --playlist-tree only shows the playlist as a tree. Enable if you want.
If you are not in the parent directory of "Party Music" you have to specify the whole path, complinat with your operating system (e.g. "C:\Music\Party Music" or "~/Music/All Music/Party Music" or /media/user/usb/Party Music).

Note:
VLC usually remembers the last setting you decided. If you run from commandline (or with a link built for this purpose) it will overcome the usual behaviour following the prescription specified by the options without changing it. If instead you will change some setting during its run it will remember the next time.

From vlc --help

-L, --loop, --no-loop        Repeat all                      (default disabled)
-Z, --random, --no-random    Play files randomly forever     (default disabled)
                             VLC will randomly play files in the playlist 
                             until  interrupted.             (default disabled)
--playlist-autostart, --no-playlist-autostart
                             Auto start                      (default enabled)
--playlist-tree, --no-playlist-tree
                             Display playlist tree           (default disabled)

Tested on VLC media player 2.1.6 Rincewind on Ubuntu, but it should work on precedent versions and for different operating systems too.

Solution 2

According to this blog post the --playlist-tree will play everything in the folder passed into it. For example:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --playlist-autostart --loop --playlist-tree c:\playlist\

Also note that the example is for a Windows system, you may need to modify the syntax slightly if you are using a Unix based system.

Solution 3

As I didn't get tbenz9's solution working, I wrote a little batch script doing the trick:

cd C:\your\directory\with\music
for /r %a in (*) do "C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" -LZ --one-instance --playlist-enqueue "%a"

The --one-instance option tells VLC media player to keep only one window, and I think --playlist-enqueue is quite explicit.

On Linux, it can be simply achieved with:

find /my/music/directory/ -type f -exec vlc -LZ '{}' +

Solution 4

For linux (I have no windows machines handy). All of this is from the man pages and/or --help output. I also TESTED these to work.

find /Music/Directory/ -type f -exec vlc --one-instance --playlist-enqueue --playlist-autostart --fullscreen -Z '{}' +

The "-L" shouldn't be needed because help for "-Z" says "Play files randomly forever"

Or, if you'd prefer to use mplayer (vlc video scaling is currently borked on one of my machines)

find /Music/Directory/ -type f -exec mplayer -enqueue -shuffle -fs -loop 0 '{}' +

Solution 5

Just figured out the easy way, you open vlc then choose media. Then open map and you choose the map with all the music. Done!

View more solutions

Comments

[Levans]

I tried what you suggest and with your command, on Windows, vlc tries to open file "C:\playlist\" and cannot, as it's not a file. It's the same on Linux btw.

[tbenz9]

It looks like "-L" is short for "--loop" and "--playlist-autostart" and "--playlist-tree" don't have shorter commands. You can see a full list of command line options with "--help". Thats where I found the answer.

[Hastur]

Just in case you were still in doubt ;) -L and --loop are the same and are reported on the same help line. By conventions (IEEE and GNU Getopt) when one letter there is one - when longer there are 2 --. By convention... is not a dogma of course, but it's rather common.

[Chris Jenks]

I tried the mplayer command on Rhaspbian but mplayer complained that -enqueue was not a valid option. Seems to work when that is removed though.

[Andrey Kazak]

The trick doesn't work with VLC 3.0.11 for Windows x64. It adds one file and the script continues waiting until I close VLC.

[Anaksunaman]

A simple example solution in PowerShell based on --one-instance and --playlist-enqueue (with basic wildcard support) can be found here.