I have a game engine and am now adding 3d sound via OpenAl. There are many sound effects that may be going off at once. For these, under a second, sound effects do I want to stream them or completely load them. For the music I will be streaming, but I have no experience in doing sound for games and was wondering if there is any benefit to streaming vs completely loading smaller sound effects. Thanks for any input.

Any one?

Under a second? I'd load them entirely.

but then again I've got completely no experience [but am working on this very thing right now]

I'll post more once I have it working and if it works well or not.

for anything less than at least 10 seconds I would decode it once, and store the decoded result.

You should maintain a sound pool of soundfx samples less than 10 seconds or so. Although, most SoundFx are only a sec or two.

In your sound resource manager, you would assign only a sound ID of sorts when an object requests to play (or maybe it has a sound assoiciated with it) that way you only ever load the data once but can play it multiple times for many objects. Much as how textures should be handled.