I've tried implementing both OpenAL+ogg support and FMOD support. I found that FMOD was a little easier to implement but the main reason I chose FMOD was because FMOD could tell me exactly how many hardware channels actually existed and would compensate in software if I accidentally went overboard. OpenAL, on the other hand, didn't give me any (obvious) way of finding out my limit and had no software fallback. So my question is: Did I miss something? There seem to be a number of indies out there who use OpenAL and don't have this problem.