silly n00by Q? can I browse without playing?

[RootlessAgrarian]

I don't use VLC all that much, except as a rock solid video file player on my Android DLNA "smart tv" device.

but just recently I pointed my OSX copy of VLC at the audio archive on the same UPnP NAS (Synology) and found it could see my entire music library (cool!).

however I was a bit frustrated that when browsing in Folder view, I couldn't browse the collection while a track was playing. as soon as I opened a folder to have a look inside, playback switched instantly to that folder. I couldn't leave one album playing while I "shopped around" for another album.

is there any way to tell VLC not to automatically switch playback to the most recently selected folder, but to let me poke around in my collection while it plays a previous selection?