I would like to suggest as a feature request soft pause / soft resume. If you have your volume way up all your subs going off and shaking the floor and pause VLC it would me a much more pleasant experience if when you hit pause, it quickly reduced the volume, and then did the pause, and much more importantly, when you resume, it would be great if it un-paused VLC at the lower volume level and gradually ramped up the volume until it reached where it was at before the pause... that would be SO much better than the sudden BLAST!!! It doesn't need to reduce to zero, and it would also be great if it would rewind the track during the pause, after all if you pause it because of a distraction of any kind, if you're watching a movie, you really need to back it up a little bit anyway, and if the phone rings right when your playlist gets to your favorite part of your favorite song, why not have it automatically back it up before you resume, that way by the time it gets to full volume, you haven't missed anything. this should all be configurable by the user in preferences, and have two sets of configurations, one for audio files and one for video. parameters should be:
rate to pause ms per % default to 10 ( 1 second to get from 100% to zero)
rate to resume ms per % default to 50 (5 seconds to go from 0% to 100%)
minimum % before pause default to 10% (10% is pretty quiet and not a shock to start / stop)
Amount to rewind default to 10 seconds for audio and 60 seconds for video
Just an idea, but once you try it, you will never want to pause / resume again any other way.