I'm using MPD as a center of my Home's music system (sort of a open source alternative to Sonos).
The biggest problem so far has been that MPD can only play either static music files or HTTP streams. There is no way to stream TO the MPD. For example, I wanted to stream podcasts from my phone (where I already have a good podcasting setup) to my home audio system.
So after some research and a whole lot of trial and error, I came up with this bodge of a setup where I have an Airplay receiver (shairport-sync), whose input eventually gets converted into a HTTP stream that MPD can consume.
The way to do this is to install and enable shairport-sync, set its config file to stream all the audio as raw CD audio into into a unix pipe, and then set it to call start.sh script when the streaming starts and end.sh script then the streaming from the phone stops.
pipe =