This short guide  describes how to install mpd as a user service in Devuan 2.1 (ascii).
Install mpd and mpc

#apt install mpd mpc

Mpc is a command line user interface for MPD server.

By default Devuan installs mpd as a system service. We don't want this, so let's remove it from startup.
If mpd is running stop it first.

#/etc/init.d/mpd stop

We don't want MPD to be started as a system service. We want to run it from a regular user account. So we must disable it. Use this command:

#update-rc.d mpd disable

To build the user configuration, extract and copy the default config with command

gunzip -c /usr/share/doc/mpd/examples/mpd.conf.gz

to directory

~/.config/mpd

(make this dir first).

Edit the config file according to your needs. For example, my config looks like this:

music_directory     "~/Music"
playlist_directory  "~/Playlists"
db_file             "~/.local/share/mpd/mpd.db"
log_file            "~/.local/share/mpd/mpd.log"
pid_file            "~/.local/share/mpd/mpd.pid"
state_file          "~/.local/share/mpd/mpd.state"
sticker_file        "~/.local/share/mpd/sticker.sql"

bind_to_address     "127.0.0.1"
log_level           "default"
restore_paused      "yes"
metadata_to_use     "artist,album,title,track,date"
auto_update         "yes"

input {
        plugin "curl"
}

audio_output {
        type            "alsa"
        name            "Headset"
        mixer_type      "software"      
}

audio_output {
    type        "fifo"
    name        "mpd_fifo"
    path        "/tmp/mpd.fifo"
    format      "44100:16:2"
}

Don't forget to create the needed directories (~/Playlists and ~/.local/share/mpd)

Run mpd.

$ mpd

If everything is ok, it directly detaches itself. (so it looks like it exits). It might complain that the db_file cannot be found, you can safely ignore this.

In order to build the database file, MPD must scan into the music_directory. A MPD client is required to request this task, for example with mpc the command is

$ mpc update

.

You most likely want to have mpd started automatically when logging into tty. To start MPD on login add the following to

~/.profile

# MPD daemon start (if no other user instance exists)
[ ! -s ~/.config/mpd/pid ] && mpd

That's it. Now you can enjoy your favorite music.

P.S.

In this simple set up i use command line user interface for MPD server. Here you can see the commands used in mpc. But there are more clients in the official Devuan repository (TUI and GUI).