mpd plays music through the audio device of the system running mpd, though, right? It doesn't stream, unless there's some configuration I missed... I've been using it locally for years and it's fine at that use-case.
I recently switched from Volumio to Logitech Media Server for playing audio over a couple raspberry pis and like how simple it is. It's GPL and if you install the Material Skin add on it looks nice enough. Volumio was too complex for something that just streams audio files.
> MPD is designed around a client/server architecture, where the clients and server (MPD is the server) interact over a network. Thus, running MPD is only half of the equation. To use MPD, you need to install a MPD client (aka MPD interface).
Correct. I run mpd on my desktop machine, then connect to it from a client either running on my desktop (https://github.com/floren/Ampd) or on my phone or my laptop. However, regardless of where my client is executing, the music comes out of the speakers attached to my desktop. If there's a way to stream music from the server to the client, I am not aware of it.
I've definitely done it before. It used to be my primary way to stream music at work from my home server. This was likely a decade ago so I couldn't say exactly how it was set up (I've since switched to the, now seemingly abandoned, Subsonic) but knowing me SSH probably played a key part.