I just use as little ALSA as I can get away with and cmus. I always find configuring it a pain but once it's done it's done.

This reminds me of a problem I unsuccessfully tried to solve once, so I might as well ask here for some discussion. Is there a program that allows me to host my own music server and connect to it from various clients? I know of mpd but it wasn't really what I was looking for (though admittedly I didn't spend ages with it, so maybe there's some config to it), it was a massive pain to get sound coming out of the client machine and not the server, and when listening to songs I just tend to pick what I want as I want it, so being coerced into making a playlist each time was a bit annoying. Basically I just want all my music on one remote machine and a cmus-like interface whenever I need it.