[bblough]

My understanding is that the preferred way to launch PulseAudio is to launch it as part of your X session so it runs as your user. MPD supports launching in the same way. So done this way, everything runs as your user and therefore plays nicely together.

This is the approach I took, and I think it works very well.

[DSMan195276]

Yeah, you could do that. There's not really much difference between launching it with X and just configuring mpd to run as your user, though launching with X might be easier to setup in some cases.

The only problem with that approach is it means that mpd is tied to your X session. I quit or restart X every once in a while and it's nice to have my music keep going during that time. But obviously that's not a use-case everyone cares about since most people don't have a reason to leave X.