OpenAL Soft


Contents:



Overview

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).


Features

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.


OpenAL Soft 1.23.1 is now available!

The changes from 1.23.0 include:
The changes from 1.22.2 include:

Download

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.


Source Install

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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