Tonight I was setting up sound in a new project for the first time in a while, using the engine in the experimental branch. One thing that occurred to me that might be nice to change is the way sounds need to be manually added before use. In some ways, this doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the cocos paradigm, in that if I allocate a new sprite it loads/caches it's texture resource through the Texture Manager during the construction. Generally speaking, you don't have to think about resource loading often in Cocos when prototyping your code; it just handles it if it hasn't already been loaded.
I was thinking we could modify the sound engine to work in a similar fashion, so instead of adding sounds manually, you just call play with the file path and it loads/caches it if needed.