The VideoLAN Forums

I have a collection of 4000+ MP3 files that I often play in VLC with the "random" button pressed. This used to work fine, but in the latest release this functionality seems to be a lemon. It seems to concentrate on a few subdirectories for each session, going back to them over and over and even hitting the same song in the same session a lot more often than random chance should allow. Can this be fixed in a future release?

I updated to 3.0.4 recently and am experiencing the same thing. Cluster playing, repeating songs with several hundred unplayed. If I force a new song in an area of unplayed music, it finds its way back to the original cluster on the next play.

I'm going to see if I can download an older version until this is fixed.

Old versions are at https://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/
I'm trying 2.2.8, the last 2.x.x version.

Yes, this is definitely broken, and I'm also going to have to roll back to an earlier release because of it. It seems like what it does is it adds the subfolders themselves to the playlist, and then expands them within the list when they get hit in the random (or manual) selection. So, once you get a couple of subfolders expanded, there is very low chance of it selecting from a different subfolder at that point.