Yeah, you should be able to use the 486...
What I did was take the internal 60GB drive I had in my OSX machine which contained all my MP3's (HFS Formatted) and drop it into the PC in my basement. Then I installed MacDrive which allowed the PC to read/write to the HFS drive (great piece of softwre I might add)... then I loaded it up with WinAmp and the SnowCrash plug-in and set up some playlists. Ran the line-out of the sound card up from the basement, into my stereo in the living room and was done. I plan to add a cheap firewire card to the PC and move the drive back out to an external firewire case for convenience though.. That way I can swap the drive between work and home more easily. Pretty cheap and easy...
It works great, except you need at least a Pentium for the WinAmp/SnowCrash part... The Audrey works great as a front end for the music selection, although I have problems with the button bar not working correctly in the browser.
But you can get by with the 486 for file sharing only. Probably should stick with Win95 though, that should be fine. Maybe pop more RAM into it to help things out (at least 32MB?) or move to a cheap Pentium based machine.
