OpenAL is designed to function in a way that's very similar to OpenGL. As such, many of the features are easily accessible and simple to understand if you already know OpenGL, since they work in the same way, with the only significant changes being to syntax. The library does not provide file-loading functionality. While this is often seen as a negative point, it drastically reduces the size and increases the performance of the library, and reduces the scope of the library as a whole to allow it to target a particular function. It also offers developers complete freedom of what filetypes they use and how much they optimise their solutions.