In today's digital age, music has become an integral part of our lives. With the abundance of music files available, it can be a hassle to manually add them to a media player's playlist. This is where the ability to automatically load music files into VLC's playlist becomes invaluable. In this article, we will explore how to achieve this using PowerShell and Batch Scripts on the Windows platform.

Examples:

1. PowerShell Script:

   $vlcPath = "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe"

   $musicFolder = "C:\Music"

   $playlistPath = "C:\Playlists\music.m3u"



   Get-ChildItem -Path $musicFolder -Filter "*.mp3" -Recurse | ForEach-Object {

       $file = $_.FullName

       $escapedFile = $file -replace "'", "''"

       $escapedFile = $escapedFile -replace "&", "^&"

       $escapedFile = $escapedFile -replace "(", "`("

       $escapedFile = $escapedFile -replace ")", "`)"

       $command = "`"$vlcPath`" --playlist-enqueue `"$escapedFile`""

       Start-Process -FilePath powershell.exe -ArgumentList "-NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command `"$command`"" -WindowStyle Hidden

   }



   Start-Sleep -Seconds 5



   $command = "`"$vlcPath`" --playlist-save `"$playlistPath`""

   Start-Process -FilePath powershell.exe -ArgumentList "-NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command `"$command`"" -WindowStyle Hidden

This PowerShell script uses the Get-ChildItem cmdlet to recursively find all MP3 files in the specified music folder. For each file, it constructs a command to enqueue it into VLC's playlist using the --playlist-enqueue option. The script then saves the playlist using the --playlist-save option.

2. Batch Script:

   @echo off

   set "vlcPath=C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe"

   set "musicFolder=C:\Music"

   set "playlistPath=C:\Playlists\music.m3u"



   for /r "%musicFolder%" %%G in (*.mp3) do (

       "%vlcPath%" --playlist-enqueue "%%G"

   )



   timeout /t 5 >nul



   "%vlcPath%" --playlist-save "%playlistPath%"

This batch script achieves the same result as the PowerShell script. It uses a for loop to iterate over all MP3 files in the specified music folder and enqueues them into VLC's playlist. The timeout command is used to pause the script for 5 seconds before saving the playlist using the --playlist-save option.