Play random songs from a folder with VLC

play.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Directory containing your music files
# It will NOT search subfolders, you can change that by removing -maxdepth 1
MUSIC_DIR="/you/music/folder"

# Number of random songs to play
NUM_SONGS=100

# Check if VLC is installed
if ! command -v vlc &> /dev/null
then
    echo "VLC is not installed. Please install VLC to use this script."
    exit 1
fi

# Check if the directory exists
if [ ! -d "$MUSIC_DIR" ]; then
  echo "Directory $MUSIC_DIR does not exist."
  exit 1
fi

# Find all music files in the directory (excluding subdirectories) and select random ones
mapfile -t MUSIC_FILES < <(find "$MUSIC_DIR" -maxdepth 1 -type f \( -iname "*.mp3" -o -iname "*.wav" -o -iname "*.flac" -o -iname "*.ogg" \) | shuf -n $NUM_SONGS)

echo $MUSIC_FILES

# Check if enough files were found
if [ ${#MUSIC_FILES[@]} -lt $NUM_SONGS ]; then
  echo "Not enough music files found in the directory."
  exit 1
fi

# Play the random songs with VLC
vlc "${MUSIC_FILES[@]}" --play-and-exit