Doesn't FMOD have a fairly expensive license if you use it commercially? OpenAL is free.

Although the plugin does actually have the ability to play 3d sound effects, I haven't enabled that for 3DGS for the time being. I only needed it to get around the open stream hiccup of 3DGS. I've implemented the streaming sound as full stereo with no 3d effects since I intended it for background music. I don't think there should be a problem with 3d, though, and if the co-ordinate system is different it shouldn't be a major job to convert it.

I also have trouble understanding why 3dgs does that, and JCL doesn't know since he uses Direct Show. My implementation plays sounds and streams in a background thread and uses quite small buffers.