Better late than never, so for future reference, Soundpool has 1Mb buffer size limit per track. But this limit applies not to file size but to decompressed raw PCM data.
SoundPool is going to decompress the loaded audio to PCM data so it is ready to play instantly without the latency of decoding. If the audio you are loading is compressed heavily, such as MP3, then that can get blown up quite a bit.
You can use Soundpool for sounds longer than 5 seconds (I have played sounds around 30 seconds). But you might need to modify your files. You can try to convert your sound file to ogg, it seems to give better results with Soundpool.
Also, make these changes:
- Change your sound file's sampling rate to 16000 Hz
- Change your audio channel to mono, instead of stereo.
- Make sure your file after these processes is smaller than 1 mb in size.
For these changes you can use an online converter such as this one.