Funny, I just did that yesterday. I was reconfiguring my mpd server and I saw it was configured to use alsa (which, incidentally broke my sound occasionally). I set it up to use Pulseaudio and now I can listen to mpd server while listening to deezer.com that runs through browser while making a skype call on the same machine (not that I'd want to do it, anyway).

Also, alsa+dmix does everything pulseaudio does (for all my use cases) without having to run an extra daemon / abstraction layer.

> for all my use cases

Exactly. Does it support redirecting audio streams to another machine on the same network? That's a vital feature in our hackspace, where everyone can send audio to the room speakers via PA, and it's also used extensively in my living room (where the speakers are connected to the home server).

I don't know, but sending audio over a network sounds like the sort of use case that requires a sound server. Playing sound locally doesn't. Although, as I said elsewhere, I have mpd stream to icecast for playing my audio remotely so, in my case, I don't need pulseaudio for this: I imagine you could configure a similar setup where anyone on the local network can register with icecast as a "radio station" znd stream sound that way.

A workflow that enables network transparency by using a tool for radio stations might work for music, but not for anything with latency requirements. Imagine playing any video game with even a 100ms audio delay.

That's something that really bothers me about pulse: it looks like it should have a nice unixy design and work well, but actually using it is, in my experience, a complete potshot.

For me the important advance was redirecting an audio stream to a different device on my machine, as I wanted to happen when I plugged in my USB headset. Currently that works more smoothly on Linux for me than Windows.

Also, something like this should work for network sound :) http://plasmasturm.org/log/soundserverhack/

When you log out of your desktop session, does mpd continue playing? I have mpd setup to stream via icecast so I can listen to my music remotely and the issue I was having was that when I logged out of my desktop, the music would stop playing because the sound server was tied to my desktop session.

You will need to disable automatic starting, and start it manually. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=PulseAudio&mobile... (see also linked upstream docs)