PCM Audio With R2R Dac

It's late and I've been trying allday to play a WAV/PCM file but can't get it to work. I succesfully played the WAVE/PCM using one of the PWM/PCM libraries. I then wanted to try and play the same WAV/PCM data with the r2r dac. So I modified the timer interupts to use CTC mode instead of fast PWM and just copy the PCM data to PORTD inside the interupt. I built an R2R with 10k and 20k resistor from a design from an intstructable.com and got the sine wave sample code to work. Then I modifed the code to read from progmem and copy the PCM data to PORTD but I get nothing.

My understand is an 8K 8-bit PCM data is the sampled audio wave data so I should be about to send it to the DAC at 8K rate and reproduce the audio wave. I know very little about audio. I've been reading about audio and PCM all day.

Any help would be very appreciated.

Here is my sktech:

#define uint8_t byte
#define SAMPLE_RATE 8000

#include <stdint.h>
#include <avr/interrupt.h>
#include <avr/io.h>
#include <avr/pgmspace.h>
#include "sounddata.h"

volatile uint16_t sample = 0;

// This is called at 8000 Hz to load the next sample.
ISR(TIMER2_COMPA_vect) {
  if (sample >= sounddata_length) {
      cli();
    digitalWrite(13,LOW);
  }
  else {
    PORTD = pgm_read_byte(&sounddata_data[sounddata_length-1]);
  }

  ++sample;
}

void startPlayback()
{
  delay(100);
  //set digital pins 0-7 as outputs
  for (int i=0;i<8;i++){
    pinMode(i,OUTPUT);
  }
  
  digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
  cli();

//set timer2 interrupt at 8kHz
  TCCR2A = 0;// set entire TCCR2A register to 0
  TCCR2B = 0;// same for TCCR2B
  TCNT2  = 0;//initialize counter value to 0
  // set compare match register for 8khz increments
  OCR2A = 249;// = (16*10^6) / (8000*8) - 1 (must be <256)
  // turn on CTC mode
  TCCR2A |= (1 << WGM21);
  // Set CS21 bit for 8 prescaler
  TCCR2B |= (1 << CS21);   
  // enable timer compare interrupt
  TIMSK2 |= (1 << OCIE2A);


  sei();
}


void setup()
{
  pinMode(13, HIGH);
  startPlayback();
}

void loop()
{ 
}

Before even checking your code for possible errors, what exactly does your audio output sound like?
Have you tried listening to it?
If so, how? (you will need to drive a small audio amp as with those R2R DAC values, you can't drive a speaker directly).