I've been developing on Mac with OpenAL, where I had a pre-installed static library (framework). However I've not been able to locate a version for Windows. Googling just seems to turn up email archives with references to people having made a static library, but no distributions. Does anyone know where I could find one, or have a good reference for compiling it from source?

Creative distributes official OpenAL only as dynamic library.

But you can OpenAL-Soft implementation that is open-source and compile it yourself as static library: http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html Note that you will need to comply with LGPL license then.

Why do you want to use a static library? I went through the same questions, and settled with using the dynamic library. It is actually quite easy.

Attach the installer oalinst.exe with your installation. Have it run automatically during installation, and you can remove it automatically afterwards. I guess you also need to install the Microsoft C runtime (vcredist_x86.exe), in the same way?

Originally, I tried to simply attach the openal dll with my installation, but it was incompatible with some targets.

Mainly for the sake of consistency, I've had OpenAL statically linked on my development platform (Mac OSX) because it's a little bit quicker and simpler to do that there. I'll investigate OpenAL-Soft, but I may actually just switch to a dynamic library.

Thanks to both of you for the info.