Stream FLAC with MusicPD’s built-in HTTP server

For some strange reason, this isn’t documented (or not too clearly) in MusicPD’s online documentation, but you can stream FLAC with its built-in HTTP server provided your files are already encoded in FLAC.

It’s as simple as putting this in mpd.conf:

audio_output {
    type            "httpd"
    name            "FLAC over HTTP"
    encoder         "flac"
    port            "8000"
}

It doesn’t seem to consume a lot more CPU time since it doesn’t re-encode anything, and it’s convenient to listen to music on a LAN if your library is in FLAC. Surely, there are more elegant solutions to streaming lossless audio, but this works flawlessly.