I’ve been using OpenAL with my OpenGL game on Windows. I couldn’t track one bug that caused the game to crash occasionally when accessing sound source. Even alIsSource could throw an exception!
I wanted to post this as a bug report, but OpenAL’s mailing list is poorly moderated - my post was never published, although you could find some repeating spam on that list.
My bet was that I was overwriting some memory, but it was always the same thing - accessing sound sources - after some battle I gave up OpenAL and switched to portaudio. http://www.portaudio.com/
Of course portaudio is only for playback/capture of sound - I had to create a simple 3d sound engine, but it took me only few hours.
Have a look at BASS (available for Windows and OSX): http://www.un4seen.com/
It’s free for non-commercial use. I switched from Direct Sound 8 to BASS once and never turned back. Recently I wanted portable sound engine so I looked towards OpenAL and finally made my own with portaudio.