> I've successfully played a pcm file directly from across the net on my 
> NFS server and it played well... Its just mp3 files that I've had 
> problems with...
It's easy to see that the Shark can't do MP3 decoding in real time.
Just put the output in /dev/null and time it.  I don't remember the
exact figures, but I think it was about a factor of 5 to slow for real
time.  Alas, no FPU.

       -- Lennart