OpenAL Soft is a cross-platform software implementation of the OpenAL 3D audio API. It's built off of the open-sourced Windows version available originally from the SVN repository at openal.org.
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, low-pass filters, and reverb, are available through the EFX extension. It also facilitates streaming audio, multi-channel buffers, and audio capture.
OpenAL Soft is meant as a compatible update/replacement to the OpenAL Sample Implementation (the SI). The SI has been unmaintained for quite a while, and would require a lot of work to clean up. After attempting to work on the SI for a bit, I became overwhelmed with the amount of work needed, and I eventually decided to fork the old Windows version to attempt an accelerated ALSA version. The accelerated ALSA idea quickly fell through, but I ended up porting the software mixing code to be cross-platform, with multiple output backends: ALSA, OSS, DirectSound, and a .wav writer are currently implemented.
OpenAL Soft supports mono, stereo, 4-channel, 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 output, as opposed to the SI's 4-channel max (though it did have some provisions for 6 channel, this was not 5.1, and was seemingly a "late" addition). OpenAL Soft does not support the Vorbis and MP3 extensions, however those were considered deprecated even in the SI. It does, though, support some of the newer extensions like AL_EXT_FLOAT32 and AL_EXT_MCFORMATS for multi-channel and floating-point formats, as well as ALC_EXT_EFX for environmental audio effects, and others.
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