OpenAL Soft

Contents:

• Overview
• Features
• Release
• Download
• Installing

OpenAL Soft is an LGPL-licensed, cross-platform, software implementation of the OpenAL 3D audio API.
OpenAL provides capabilities for playing audio in a virtual 3D environment. Distance attenuation, doppler shift, and directional sound emitters are among the features handled by the API. More advanced effects, including air absorption, occlusion, and environmental reverb, are available through the EFX extension. It also facilitates streaming audio, multi-channel buffers, and audio capture.

If you need support, feel free to send a message to the OpenAL mailing list:
https://openal.org/mailman/listinfo/openal
There is also an issue tracker on the GitHub repository, if you wish to report a bug or make a feature request.
You can ask for help in IRC, #openal on irc.libera.chat (see https://libera.chat/ and https://libera.chat/guides for more information on libera.chat and connecting to it).

This library is multi-platform, with support for Linux, Windows, Android, OS X, iOS, and more. Audio backends for PipeWire, PulseAudio, ALSA, WASAPI, OpenSL, CoreAudio, OSS, JACK, DirectSound, WinMM, Solaris, SoundIO, PortAudio, SDL2, "Null" Output, and a .wav file writer are currently implemented. Loopback devices are also supported for playback to interface with other audio systems.

OpenAL Soft supports many extensions, including but not limited to AL_EXT_MCFORMATS and AL_EXT_FLOAT32 for multi-channel and floating-point formats, AL_EXT_BFORMAT for B-Format (ambisonic) soundfield audio buffers, and ALC_EXT_EFX for environmental audio effects such as reverb, occlusion, and obstruction. It supports mono, stereo, 4-channel, 5.1, 7.1, HRTF, UHJ, and B-Format output.

• Implemented the AL_SOFT_UHJ_ex extension.
• Implemented the AL_SOFT_buffer_length_query extension.
• Implemented the AL_SOFT_source_start_delay extension.
• Implemented the AL_EXT_STATIC_BUFFER extension.
• Fixed compiling with certain older versions of GCC.
• Fixed compiling as a submodule.
• Fixed compiling with newer versions of Oboe.
• Improved EAX effect version switching.
• Improved the quality of the reverb modulator.
• Improved performance of the cubic resampler.
• Added a compatibility option to restore AL_SOFT_buffer_sub_data.
  The option disables AL_EXT_SOURCE_RADIUS due to incompatibility.
• Reduced CPU usage when EAX is initialized and FXSlot0 or FXSlot1 are not used.
• Reduced memory usage for ADPCM buffer formats.
  They're no longer converted to 16-bit samples on load.

• Fixed CoreAudio capture support.
• Fixed handling per-version EAX properties.
• Fixed interpolating changes to the Super Stereo width source property.
• Fixed detection of the update and buffer size from PipeWire.
• Fixed resuming playback devices with OpenSL.
• Fixed support for certain OpenAL implementations with the router.
• Improved reverb environment transitions.
• Improved performance of convolution reverb.
• Improved quality and performance of the pitch shifter effect slightly.
• Improved sub-sample precision for resampled sources.
• Improved blending spatialized multi-channel sources that use the source radius property.
• Improved mixing 2D ambisonic sources for higher-order 3D ambisonic mixing.
• Improved quadraphonic and 7.1 surround sound output slightly.
• Added config options for UHJ encoding/decoding quality.
  Including Super Stereo processing.
• Added a config option for specifying the speaker distance.
• Added a compatibility config option for specifying the NFC distance scaling.
• Added a config option for mixing on PipeWire's non-real-time thread.
• Added support for virtual source nodes with PipeWire capture.
• Added the ability for the WASAPI backend to use different playback rates.
• Added support for SOFA files that define per-response delays in makemhr.
• Changed the default fallback playback sample rate to 48khz.
  This doesn't affect most backends, which can detect a default rate from the system.
• Changed the default resampler to cubic.
• Changed the default HRTF size from 32 to 64 points.

Building OpenAL Soft needs CMake version 3.0 or newer (older versions may possibly work as well, but are untested). Autotools is not supported. It should build on most compilers.

The latest release is 1.23.1, and is available in source form.
openal-soft-1.23.1.tar.bz2
Win32 and Win64 binaries are also provided.
openal-soft-1.23.1-bin.zip

A more up-to-date Git repository is available at GitHub and repo.or.cz.
Note that you will need to install Git to download it.

Older releases can be found here, and older binaries can be found here.

To install OpenAL Soft, first extract it. It will automatically extract itself into the openal-soft-1.23.1/ directory. Using your favorite shell, go into the build/ directory, and run:
cmake ..
Alternatively, you can use any available CMake front-end, like cmake-gui, ccmake, or your preferred IDE's CMake project parser.

Assuming configuration went well, you can then build it. The command
cmake --build .
will instruct CMake to build the project with the toolchain chosen during configuration (often GNU Make or NMake, although others are possible).

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