Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Thanks for this comment, Jimmy, as well as the one above.
It seems that there are a number of audiophiles out there who feel that a real time kernel will deliver a more reliable bit stream (because of lower latencies) to an external DAC, perhaps reducing jitter or somehow otherwise contributing to better sound.
https://www.ap-linux.com/about/
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/realtime-kernel-audio-playback/13542
https://elinux.org/images/8/82/Elc2011_lorriaux.pdf
http://www.tophifi.it/
But others (besides you) don't feel it's necessary
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Sound/How_to_Enable_Realtime_for_M…
Bottom line - this is probably another one of those arguments between the side that has listened and claims to hear a difference and the side that has studied the engineering principles and claims there can't be a difference.
Thanks for your comments, Miguel.
From my perspective at least, there are two main advantages for using MPD.
First, MPD is really a music server, implying you must use a client to make it play (like Cantata, for example). This architecture makes it straightforward to build a very lightweight music server system, like for example a Raspberry Pi (or in my case a Cubox i4) that runs headless and sits somewhere in your audio rack, connected to your receiver or a standalone DAC that is connected into your system. Then you control this from e.g. your Android phone / tablet or laptop or chromebook or something else by running the client software there.
Second, MPD is readily configured to talk directly to a DAC (that's a digital to analog converter) using ALSA, thus bypassing all mixers, resamplers, etc to get an untouched bit stream out to your music system. In contrast, many music players do not provide this kind of control, leaving configuration up to gstreamer and/or PulseAudio, which in turn can be much more difficult to configure to pass the digital audio through untouched.
You might want to read a few earlier articles I've written here that touch on this subject:
https://opensource.com/article/17/8/cantata-music-linux
https://opensource.com/article/17/7/mpd-clients
https://opensource.com/article/17/6/armbian-cubox-i4pro