Sound - most compatible sound library

[WILL]

If you don't mind working with headers, you can always use OpenAL. You can then convert all your audio files to Ogg and implement an Ogg audio decoder.

[deathshadow]

If all you need is simple playback, it's hard to go wrong with SDL... especially with free pascal now coming with the appropriate SDL units built in and headers available for just about anything. Besides SDL gives you easy to access keyboard, mouse and stick interfaces, relatively simple (and fully cross-platform) 2d graphics, and makes a better wrapper for OpenGL than GLUT ever did.

Though if you need something more complex or somethign that plays nice with directX, I say go with Will's advice and dive into OpenAL.

[WILL]

SDL does have a very good mixer/playback library for many audio formats (including MODs) however, unless it's been fixed since, on Windows (not confirmed on Linux or Mac OS X) there seems to be an issue with playback of audio at 44.1kHz. You'll have to set your audio only as high as 22.05kHz on Windows if you want to use SDL's mixer for playback. This seems to be the biggest drawback to the 1.2.x version of SDL on Windows. I'm not sure about 1.3.x or other platforms as I've not used the mixer on anything other than Win32/SDL 1.2.x, but it has been reported that it works just fine.

Can anyone confirm or update us on this issue?

[LP]

In addition to Audiere, BASS and FMOD, there is also SquallSound.

However, if you want 64-bit sound library (using FPC 64-bit?), it might be difficult to find. I haven't had any sound issues in 32-bit applications running on 64-bit OS, but in our games we've used BASS.

[gintasdx]

SquallSound works really great with FPC. It would be nice if somebody would make a Pascal headers from few GameMaker sound libraries like SAudio or Super Sound System.