Preloading sounds

I have many audio files (hundreds) and I would like to preload them (all or at least a portion of them) in memory. However, when I create an OgreAL::Sound it also creates an audio source, and the hardware seems to limit the number of sources to a few dozen.

in plain openAL, as far as I recall, you could have an infinite number of 'buffers' and a few sources;

So, can I have many buffers in OgreAL but only a few sources?

The last version of ogreAL handles this for you, you can have as many sounds as you like and it will automatically manage the sources for you. It doesn't create a source each time it creates a sound, it creates all the sources it can during initialisation and holds them in a list, whenever you 'play()' a sound, it requests a new source to play the sound on from the list.

So the source limitation isn't a problem, but, I think to pre-load the sounds you need to call play() then stop() so the buffers get filled.

oh yeah, you're right I just looked at Sound::play() and it does do that; I've been using an old version for a while and did not notice the change when I updated.