It’s OK, I always hook my laptop to my local network (1Gbps) a let Amarok scan the music folders and cache everything in. All I have to do next is turnoff folder monitoring.
I’m still looking for a way to “buffer” music on slow networks (from work!). The problem with sshfs was that the OS doesn’t see the files as network files so the buffering for vlc, wmp and amarok doesn’t kick in. Tunneling SMB through ssh is a waist of bandwidth. Hopefully firefly will solve this problem.
I’m now reading the wiki and will install firefly next weekend.
Thanks for your help.