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My music files are slit up into folders according to artist. When I try to play the whole lot at random, VLC will only expand the folder containing the random song it has chosen. Now, when it goes to play the next random song, the bulk of the playlist is made up of songs fromt eh same artist, due to that folder being expanded, with the rest still closed. So it keeps playing music from the same artist, instead of the variety I wanted from using "shuffle". If it expanded all of the folders, then it will have a roughly equal chance of playing music from the other folders/artists.
1. Artist 1
2. Artist 2
3. Artist 3
4. -Song from artist 3
5. -Song from artist 3
6. -Song from artist 3
7. -Song from artist 3
8. -Song from artist 3
9. -Song from artist 3
10. -Song from artist 3
11. -Song from artist 3
12. Artist 4
13. Artist 5

According to this example of folder structure, once it expands an artist folder (artist 3 in the example), the majority of that list is now populated with music from artist 3, and there is a low chance of expanding any of the others. In real life, I actually have a lot more songs in each folder, so the repetition is greater than in this example.
I've been using another program called MusicBee, to get around this issue. It just plays at random, absolutely any song, no matter how far down the heirarchy it is.
But music bee has the issue of when I erase my search term, the playlist doesn't update to go back to playing everything without interrupting the currently playng song.

bump.

bump bump for me, too.

I have noticed that once it happens, if you resave the playlist, you at least keep those open folders open. Crazy tedious to open them all manually though.

NOT a solution though.

I have hundreds of artist folders. Yes, very tedious. and each artist folder has about a dozen album folders within. I don't have time to open thousands of folders.

bump

You can generate a playlist for VLC. A batch script example:

Thanks, but Will that be effective for over 3TB of music? And will that be able to play each song referenced by .cue files, which Music Bee does? Some albums have a single .flac file, and the .cue file tells it all the info about the songs contained within. Music bee works this out, and shows all the songs in the list, even ones contained within the whole-album .flac files.

Thank you for your report Nuttapillar. You reminded me of a bug I forgot to file a while back. I have filed it now as ticket 19119.

I faced with this problem of 'expanding' folders when I updated to the new version (3.0.4, Aug 2018). To solve it I reinstalled the version (2.2.6 Dec 2017) and when I click 'open folder', it automatically finds and lists all the audio files recursively.

Hello all,

My wife and I had the same issue with the latest VLC and we have a workaround. In order to play all audio files in multiple folders you have to select "shuffle" and "loop all". Normally you would only have to select "shuffle" to play random songs but since the update you have to select the "loop all" as well.

Hope that helps, it certainly helped us.

Best regards

Isn't this basic functionality? How has this not been added in 17 years?

bump, this really is basic stuff that should be implemented (along with some default sort order whenever a new song/folder is added to the playlist)

Drove me crazy as well, but found the solution. You have to expand the folders in vlc settings.

Tools -> Preferences -> All -> Playlist -> Subdirectory Behavior -> Expand

It's probably set as collapsed.

Drove me crazy as well, but found the solution. You have to expand the folders in vlc settings.

Tools -> Preferences -> All -> Playlist -> Subdirectory Behavior -> Expand

It's probably set as collapsed.

Thanks.
In my case, the "problem" was:
In 3.0.3 the default subdirectory behavior was set on "collapse" but it still expanded all folders.
In 3.0.4 "collapse" really did what it should and had to change it to "expand".
That's why I haven't thought of changing this setting before.

hello. I've followed the instructions above and set behavior to expand, but still when i drag and drop a folder into the playlist, the display remains as a folder rather than expanding the files inside.

it used to be possible to drag and drop a bunch of folders into an empty playlist and immediately they would expand to show all files contained. how can we get back to that option?

I had the same problem when upgrading to the new version.

Following some threads here, this worked for me:
1) Tools -> Preferences -> All -> Playlist -> Subdirectory Behavior -> Expand
2) Media -> Open Folder -> <select folder and accept>

This appended the new folder, completely expanded.
NB:
a) I stopped and restarted VLC between steps 1 & 2 for other reasons (trying some other stuff), but I am not sure if that was necessary.
b) I tried drag and drop folder into the playlist, it didn't seem to work. However, I did not close/restart VLC to check that

Hope it helps.

Tested on 3.0.4.

Hey all,

so this settings solution gets me going on my windows machine.
I also use VLC on Android. Which is similar, but in some ways subtly inferior to 'full' VLC.

This setting regarding subfolder behaviour is not present in Android. Or am I missing something? Is there another fix in Android?

regards from Amsterdam

Indeed, the setting does not seem to be present in the Android version.

I don't see the option in the latsest 3.0.8 version for Windows either...

Drove me crazy as well, but found the solution. You have to expand the folders in vlc settings.

Tools -> Preferences -> All -> Playlist -> Subdirectory Behavior -> Expand

It's probably set as collapsed.

Thank you very much. This solved 95% of my problem.