I'm guessing that this question will provoke all kinds of lectures, but I'll go ahead with it anyways, can I use sound manager for sound in my game? Yes I am quite aware of all the other options and have some experience with them, but for reasons of my own, I'd prefer sound manager. Is it deprecated, is it in danger of being deprecated, are there any signs of future deprecation etc...?

A quick Google search shows that the Sound Manager has indeed been deprecated. I can certainly understand the appeal of it, though, given the alternatives...

OpenAL is pretty nice and easy to use, though historically I've had a lot of headaches from configuration management of the framework itself. However, Apple now includes it as a standard part of Mac OS X. Also note that the current version only does audio playback, so if you need audio input, it doesn't cover that.

CoreAudio looks pretty daunting at first, but isn't too bad once you get over the initial learning curve. If you want to go the CoreAudio route, I'd recommend looking at the MTCoreAudio framework as a reference. It certainly helped me a lot.

I'm familiar with some openal but was turned off initially due to the number of hours it took to get the framework to work. It seems ridiculous that apple wouldn't create some fairly simplistic audio framework for programmers.

Sound Manager is deprecated since 10.0.0 IIRC. It doesn't do more than stereo sound, which is a reasonably major issue for games...

OpenAL is pretty easy to use, and CoreAudio doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as it's made out to be

Search the forums for some OpenAL+ogg sample code.

I've tried to run two separate pieces of code for loading a sound through openal which are from several tutorials and each time I get an error when trying to create a source. Here's one of the pieces of code I've tried building:

http://www.edenwaith.com/products/pige/t...openal.php

Anyone have any idea what's going on?

Without you telling us any useful information, no.