mpd in debian stable is unable to play some files

I had trouble for a long time getting the version of MPD in Debian Stable (0.11.5-3) to play certain MP3 files through ALSA. See, for example, this one. I'd get errors from MPD along the lines of "problems opening audio device while playing [filename] ALSA snd_pcm_hw_params_set_channels error: Invalid argument".

After looking at the files in question and seeing the patch given here for a similar error in a different program, I'm pretty sure that this is an issue with MPD trying to output monaural MP3 files in stereo (maybe something is messed up in the files themselves that's telling it to do this). It seems to be fixed in the version in Debian Unstable, 0.12.1-1. I backported the packages to Stable; you can find them here. You'll need mpd and libmpcdec3, but not libmpcdec-dev unless you intend to build your own MPD package.