WaveBank and Cue have IsPrepared members, which will tell you whether they are ready to play. However, there is no explicit Prepare() function, so I guess you'll want to call GetCue() once for each cue in a sound bank when you load the sound bank, in an attempt to pre-prepare them, and then perhaps draw a progress bar until IsPrepared returns true.
Jon Watte, Direct3D MVP
Tweets, occasionallykW X-port 3ds Max .X exporter
kW Animation source code
