Anyone know a safe place to download OpenAL?

[SenMithrarin85]

I have read that installing it is supposed to fix sound issues. But all of the links on the web I have found are dead. Any help'll be appreciated.

[2point4]

BioShock uses FMOD. OpenAL won't help at all. If you needed OpenAL to run BioShock it would come with it.

[RStriker69 ♥]

It does come with it, as part of the unreal engine 2 hooks. The fix he's talking about is adding renaming the dll from syswow64 (on 64 bit windows) to what bioshock looks for and put it in the same folder as the games exe.

It does something for sound dropping, similar to editing the channel ceiling, though you're totally right, the sound is all encoded in fmod. I have no idea why adding the dll helps, but it does in some cases.

To the OP, 64 bit windows comes with openal dlls, so you shouldn't necessarily need to install the latest version. If you're using 64 bit windows, look in ..\windows\syswow64 for the file wrap_oal.dll, copy it, don't move it, to the same directory as bioshock.exe and rename it openal32.dll.

From what I can tell in my own testing, it takes longer play time for the sound dropping bug to kick in, but once it does you'll have to restart to get it playing all sounds again without any drops.