The reason for using OpenAL is for platforms that dont have alsa/oss/esd/... support For one it gives a chance to test audio on windows for example -- and on mac osx (although the winecoreaudio driver is making great progress).
planning to use OpenAL for portability reasons is a bad idea IMO: - it won't support the mapping required by dsound (unless we decide to drop the HW support) - OpenAL is overkill (in terms of API) for portability (PortAudio would be better IMO) - OpenAL doesn't support recording AFAICT
A+