I'll change the read/write bytes to be the same. At one point, they were the same, but I changed it in the hopes that reading more initially would fill up aplay's buffer and provide me with the padding I needed to cover for the bursty 802.11b stream.

I believe I will need the full-blown local reader that Zaxo suggested because aplay's maximum buffer size is very small. I think I need something several seconds long.

As far as the capacity goes, the the audio format is a stereo signed 32 bit, big endian stream at 22050 Hz. I believe that this translates into 1.3Mb of data per second, which should be well within the capacity of an unladen, full strength, 802.11b connection.