[hn_throwaway531]

>> In my case I want to play audio files outside of my home directory but VLC doesn’t have access

You can try using soft links as a work around.

[licebmi__at__]

Is this possible? Softlinks is just an indication of where to look for the file, but if the process can't see the file, a softlinks won't help.

A hard link should be able to see the file, but they need to be in the same file system, and I don't know much about ubuntu's default partition scheme to say if it's doable for most of the users.