Yeah. To be honest I'd pretty much use OpenAL, period.
The reason I suggested only using it on Vista is thus; I hit some problems (hardware related) which limited the number of available sound channels, which resulted in some sounds not being played. This only happened when using the OpenAL Hardware driver.
The Software Driver didn't have this problem but it did have a slight resource overhead. Working on the assumption that any PC capable of running Vista wouldn't have a problem with giving up an extra bit of CPU time, I opted for OpenAL on Vista only.
FreeAudio and DirectSound had issues of their own on Vista, at the time, so it made sense to use something else for Vista, and FreeAudio for everything else. I don't know if these problems have been resolved either by BRL or via driver updates (Not sure what was causing the problem in the first place).
The reason I suggested only using it on Vista is thus; I hit some problems (hardware related) which limited the number of available sound channels, which resulted in some sounds not being played. This only happened when using the OpenAL Hardware driver.
The Software Driver didn't have this problem but it did have a slight resource overhead. Working on the assumption that any PC capable of running Vista wouldn't have a problem with giving up an extra bit of CPU time, I opted for OpenAL on Vista only.
FreeAudio and DirectSound had issues of their own on Vista, at the time, so it made sense to use something else for Vista, and FreeAudio for everything else. I don't know if these problems have been resolved either by BRL or via driver updates (Not sure what was causing the problem in the first place).