I'm starting a new project where I'll be making a standalone internet mp3 player. I listen to internet radio stations almost all the time and would love to have a way to enjoy those stations without my computer.
I've just ordered a VS1011 mp3 decoder breakout board from Sparkfun. I plan on connecting this up to a Propeller Chip running my custom TCP/IP stack, PropTCP. The Propeller will buffer the audio and feed the raw mp3 stream to the decoder chip.
The overall bandwidth required by this application is pretty low. A normal 96kbps Shoutcast stream only requires 12Kbytes/sec. A small 256kbit SPI SRAM chip should provide a nice 2.5 second buffer in case there is packet loss or severe network latency.
I also did a bit of research on the Shoutcast stream format and found out it isn't very well documented. Luckily it is quite simple and numerous people have 'reverse engineered' it. The stream itself runs on a HTTP-like protocol and uses embedded metadata sent every X bytes. More information about it can be found here.