Hey guys! I'm looking for an audio library to complement my use of OpenGL for graphics, and I was hoping I could find something as unrestrictive yet powerful. My game currently works on all OSes, and I want it to be easy to port to consoles if ever given the opportunity... but given that I have made no money on it yet, I'm looking for free, and given that I would like to make money on it someday, I'm looking for something that's okay with commercial works being made on it. So far, I've seen...

• SFML which looks nice, but isn't dedicated audio - so I'd love to avoid the clutter and just get an audio library
  
• Allegro which sounds like the same thing
  
• OpenAL which sounded great until the front page of their website was broken looking
  
• Fmod which is awesome but requires money if used it looks like? (viewing Ex version of API)
  
  So, thoughts/suggestions? I'm guessing Fmod is the best path, and just contacting their support team if I'm ever actually going to make money off it (since it looks like it's free until that point) but if the others are worth it or still up to date despite appearances, I'm down for recommendations.

SFML which looks nice, but isn't dedicated audio - so I'd love to avoid the clutter and just get an audio library

SFML is designed to be very modular, and is normally built as a set of separate (but related) libraries. You can use the audio functionality without having to include the rest of the library. I don't have personal experience, but I'm lead to believe Allegro is the same.

If you're happy with the audio functionality provided by one of those libraries go ahead and use it -- you won't have to include all the graphics, networking, and other stuff you don't want -- no unneeded increase in file-size, performance impact, etc.

Just something to consider.



Otherwise, FMOD Ex is a great library, and yes -- you can use it for free for non-commercial projects.

You could also consider BASS.

In case anyone else is pursuing this, my results:

Tried OpenAL directly at first and found it a bit frustrating, not easy to move around between OSes. Just got SFML working on my Windows machine and I must say, the tutorials are excellent! Using 2.0 myself (built my own sources even since the release candidate was a bit outdated and had laggy joystick work) and having joysticks there too made part 2 of my quest (adding plural/multiple joystick support) helped out a lot too.

So, SFML is recommended, and I hope to edit this post once I try it out on Linux and Mac too.