I may have been mistaken earlier when I said that out_lame is faster than real-time. I'm using a very slow PC (Duron 600) and it seemed to be slightly faster than real-time. But now that I check again, perhaps it is real-time.

However, I don't really understand how out_lame can be a real-time plug-in. If you had a slow PC, and used very high compression, then it wouldn't be able to keep up.

If you want to speed things up, then use multiple instances of Winamp. They don't interfere with each other.