OpenAL Reviews & Product Details

Support for Multi channel audio rendering Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not everything works perfectly and is less actively maintained Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It has lots of options for audio modulation Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very little documentation, hard to use, steep learning curve, obscure feature limitations, prone to errors Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

OpenAL is easy to work with, has fewer lines of code to write (as opposed to ALSA though with fewer options) and, more importantly, works on Windows and Linux Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing really. I used it to build a recording app and in-game audio Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

OpenAL is designed to function in a way that's very similar to OpenGL. As such, many of the features are easily accessible and simple to understand if you already know OpenGL, since they work in the same way, with the only significant changes being to syntax.

The library does not provide file-loading functionality. While this is often seen as a negative point, it drastically reduces the size and increases the performance of the library, and reduces the scope of the library as a whole to allow it to target a particular function. It also offers developers complete freedom of what filetypes they use and how much they optimise their solutions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My main dislike about OpenAL is the learning curve for people not using OpenGL. These users have to learn a lot about OpenAL to make it feasible for use. As such, some users are put-off when comparing the library to other, more feature-packed libraries or existing wrappers over OpenAL. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.