Cross Platform Audio Programming

If it's for a personal project, you might want to take a look at fmod. Unless they changed it, it is free for personal use (with some restrictions, check the site for that).

Personally never used OpenAL before, but I still hear people are using it, and I think (not sure) that SDL is using it under the hood, so it might be a viable option still.

OpenAL can give hardware mixed EAX and 3D in Windows Vista and 7 by talking directly to hardware but only for the players with a specific brand of sound cards. I did not get 4.1 surround in hardware OpenAL with my sound card. Then I thought that I might as well use software mixing for the sake of determinism between computers.

One of OpenAL implementations is open-source and works as software mixer without depending on hardware features. It is called OpenAL Soft: http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html

FMOD is probably what you're after.

There's also BASS if you don't mind paying for a licence.

If you do't need anything too complex you could also use the audio part of SFML or SDL.

Thanks for your input guys.

Its a commercial game.

Looking like I'm going to have to code the sound for each platform