The VideoLAN Forums

VLC does a lot of very advanced and amazing things, yet somehow some extremely simple and popular features have been overlooked such as the ability to simply shuffle the playlist. Almost every other media player has done this, even ancient windows 3.1 media players could shuffle the playlist over 2 decades ago, yet VLC doesn't have a way to do it with... It can however sort the playlist, either ascending or descending by title, artist, album, track number, and uri... sorting by all these things is much more complicated than just mixing them up. Some of the advanced features that VLC includes make it very surprising that one cannot simply shuffle the playlist. Random isn't the same as shuffle, you can't see how the tracks have been rearranged and you have no way to re-order the tracks during playback if you are in random mode. I realize there are some addons that do this, but they won't work through the web interface, so it would be really great if this was something that VLC just did on it's own

Click on random button.

Yes, I see the random button, that is nowhere near the same thing as shuffling the playlist. With Random, it just plays in a random order, but you can't see how the list was shuffled and you cannot modify the order of the playlist AT ALL.. because rearranging the tracks in the playlist have no real effect if you have random turned on. The way almost every other media player works is that you can shuffle the actual playlist, and see and modify the shuffled order if desired, and then save the randomized and modified playlist.

For example on how shuffle is different from random... I like rock, my wife likes country, We load 500 songs into the play list, 250 rock, 250 country, now we want to just shuffle it up and arrange it so it plays at most 3 of either genre before playing something from the other. We don't want to end up with our songs in alphabetical order, and we don't want to just push the random button, because the random button will not only play the same genre over and over for hours, it will also play the same SONG over and over... it just random. Shuffle will play each song once and only once, no matter if songs are added and moved around manually or what not. Random will not show the new playing order and not give you an opportunity to change it.

Another example, say I want to listen to a lot of 80's music.. so I load an 80's MP3 folder into my playlist.. this will load all the songs off my hard drive in alphabetical order. so I don't want to listen to the same artist all at once, I want to shuffle the list.. Well, when I hit random, it will just play songs in a random order, but maybe I'll end up listening to Def Leopard for an hour straight, maybe not, who knows, it's random... I might even listen to the same song 6 times in one hour, again, it's just random, but if I can shuffle the playlist, then I can scroll through and see how it has been shuffled and if I see large blocks of the same artist, I can either just shuffle it again and again until I like it, or I can rearrange those songs and distribute them through the otherwise shuffled list, and then save the list. Shuffle will not play the same file more than once, it will play each file once and only once but in a re-arranged order, and allow me to see and change that order to my liking. Without the shuffle function, I can't do any of this.

Every time someone mentions shuffle, they just get... hit the random button, but that does not solve or close the issue, random play and shuffle are two completely different things. What is needed is to shuffle the playlist... and now see the new re-arranged order in the playlist itself... not random play.

PLEASE Consider adding a SHUFFLE PLAYLIST option to the playlist, to anyone who uses VLC primarily for music, it makes a world of difference!

In Android, I found a way to shuffle all songs, regardless of creating playlists: hold any song, a menu appears, tap "play all".
When player starts, tap the shuffle icon on the bottom left - et voilà

Following VLC Extensions can do it: Shuffle Playlist and Sampler (PG).