I’m making a Python script to play music through VLC and I wanted to add a way to control audio playback of VLC, like pause/play, next/previous, etc.
I know I can change shuffle mode before launching VLC with the --random and --no-random arguments. However, is there a way to change playback settings through the Linux terminal while VLC is running?


That depends on your distro. On Debian/ubuntu(-based) distro’s, you can try
apt list --installed playerctl, which will output nothing if the package isn’t yet installed, or the package name with version info if it is installed. To install it, runsudo apt install playerctlOn arch(-based) distro’s, you can try
pacman -Qi playerctl, which should return an error if there is no such package installed, or several lines of info if it is installed. To install it, runsudo pacman -S playerctl, ideally after running a full system upgrade withsudo pacman -SyuTesting if the current shell can execute something does not require looking at the installed packages, there are portable ways to do that