Good sound storage method

I'm looking for a good way to store the sounds that will be used in my engine.

I could store them in an array of DXSoundSamples, which is my class that handles loading sounds and creating the secondary buffers for them. Problem is that all sounds would have to be loaded into memory at startup. Benefit is that it would be easy to find which sample is to be played -> DXSound->Play(int sound_num).

Or I could store them as a linked list in memory and load them on demand. Good memory usage but to play a sound I would have to search the linked list, add the sound to the list, retrieve the id, play it, remove from list. Not good in real time.

Any ideas?

Maybe try using the STL for this. Look into using a map perhaps? Pretty much you just want to insert all the sounds for a particular level I would imagine. So when you are loading the level data or whatever just load the sounds that will be used for that particular map. You can even sub-divide further but this should be fine. If your not using levels then use some form of partitioning.