Keep HDMI audio alive/disable screensaver for audio
Assume the graphic card's HDMI port is used for audio and VLC plays an audio file, then VLC does not deactivate the screen saver because this feature is only available for movie files. Now if the user leaves the desktop, the screen goes into energy save after a couple of minutes and because of the HDMI specification, this shuts down the audio signal too. There seems to be no way around that (except using other audio hardware or disabling screensavers completely), google lists several examples for this HDMI-powersave problem (not VLC specific).
My current workaround is to start another VLC instance, open a movie and pause it while I am listening to music, switch off the monitor and leave the desktop.
Please add screensaver deactivation for audio files (or whatever keeps HDMI alive) to handle this problem. As proper code is already there for video files, this should be trivial to fix, I guess.