[Icecast] strange downloading occuring...

[Jesse Fishman]

I'm experiencing a strange phenomenon I think...

I've got a playlist of 3 mp3's (total of about 9MB) which I've got ices0.3 streaming into icecast2.0

It seems that when I try and connect, it opens up windows media player, then buffers for 2-4 whole minutes, then plays the stream.  I had my buddy try it, and he said his computer downloaded for 10 minutes, a total of 128 MB before he quit. I've tried typing in the address of the form:
localhost.com:8000/ices
and
localhost.com:8000/ices.m3u
and the same thing happens--it says its buffering, but the numbers jump a bit, i.e.

buffering...19% complete
buffering...7% complete
buffering...32% complete
buffering...24% complete
--those aren't the actual numbers, but just a representation of what is happening. Eventually it gets to 100% and plays, but I find this behavior odd.

Am I just wrong in assuming that this is supposed to start playing an mp3 as soon as information is gathered to the player? Is it actually supposed to download all mp3's first? And why would it say it was downloading any more than 9MB?

Thanks,
Jesse