OpenAL randomly stops playing some sounds, can only fix with reboot
I've had similar problems with OpenAL, as the commenters stated. We had spurious problems on different hardware and on different OS releases. Really, it was nearly impossible to reproduce. The only reason we even found out about the problem was the significant percentage of users who experienced crashes or other severe audio problems. We tried for months trying to make it work, but in the end the stability problems we experienced just weren't manageable. We ended up going with another library and took OpenAL completely out of the picture. I certainly would not recommend it for new projects.