>Check out Cantata, if you haven't tried it yet, it is really good...
and actively developed. The developer is pretty chill and often, but not always, receptive to feature requests.
For emms, I barely know myself.
Basically, you run emms-player-mpd-connect
and after that you can use emms-playlist-mode-go
to get mpd's queue or use e.g. emms-player-mpd-pause
to (unintuitively) toggle playback.
The thing with mpd however is that you can use any number of players locally or remote to control it. I personally like cantata (qt-based) and used ncmpcpp (ncurses) as a fallback, but was hoping to replace the latter with emms. Let's see how that turns out.
Edit: Oh, and you need to switch the bind_to_address and port stuff in that mpd config.