[openal] how to uninstall OpenAL Soft on Windows 10

Chris Robinson chris.kcat at gmail.com
Sun May 29 13:51:15 EDT 2022


On 5/28/22 22:54, Carlos Nazareno wrote:
> Hi. I recently bought  a physical soundblaster X-Fi card that supports
> EAX and OpenAL in hardware.
> 
> I wish to safely uninstall OpenAL Soft (version 1.21.1 on Windows 10)
> now and use the creative hardware OpenAL as I notice reverb effects,
> etc are not as crispy as when I had my Audigy in games.
> 
> So far I have not had luck finding instructions via search engine on
> how to uninstall OpenAL Soft, and some games are still listing OpenAL
> Soft as my sound provider.

Hi.

It seems you had your question answered on IRC, but to give an answer 
here too, you basically just need to delete the files you copied to the 
system to install it. That would be

C:\windows\system32\soft_oal.dll

and on 64-bit systems, also:

C:\windows\syswow64\soft_oal.dll

Although as long as the app/game allows selecting which audio device to 
use, you should be able to select the hardware device instead of OpenAL 
Soft with it installed. If some games are still using OpenAL Soft with 
the hardware drivers installed, they may have an OpenAL Soft device 
selected in their audio configuration, and/or they may come with their 
own copy of OpenAL Soft which bypasses the hardware driver.


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