When playing simultaneous sounds, unrelated sounds stop playing

[Tameem Hamoui]

Let me preface by saying I have read documentation and looked at examples but I'm finding myself lost. I have many questions:

1. Do I need to preload effects if I don't notice any slowdown in my app? If I have a function that preloads and then plays a sound will it keep preloading the same sound each time my function is called? is there any harm in preloading the same sound more than once? Will it just preload it once and ignore me preloading it the other times?

2. Is setting reserved sources important in oalsimpleaudio.sharedinstance? What is a reserved source exactly? What is a buffer? When do I need to change reserved sources?

3. I have many simultaneous sounds (explosions) in my game. I notice sometimes that an unrelated sound (firing) will stop working when there are a large number of effects played around the same time. Im pretty sure this why this is happening but I need to conduct more tests to be sure. Why would an unrelated sound stop playing? anyone experienced this? What could I do to prevent it other than the obvious "play less sounds".

[Tameem Hamoui]

I just read that if your are using instances of alsource you shouldn't set reserved sources to 32. What should i set it to? I notice if I'm using alsource without setting any reserved sources my app crashes