Windows sound and music--help!

[curry]

I'm trying to get my game onto Windows from Mac and it has background 
music continually, as well as foreground sounds. This can be 
accomplished with two or more players when QuickTime is present, or 
with one player for music and playing sounds directly with "play" 
command when QT is not installed.

However, I have run into several problems and am getting rather 
desperate to choose the best course of action considering the 
situation.

First my idea was to give the best possible experience for Windows 
users when Quicktime was not present, but encourage QT installation 
for best results. However, when I tried it, QT behaved very badly 
with the music (MID files). When there was any onscreen action (it's 
an arcade game and also has some animation with resizing images in 
the option screens) the music was likely to bog down and even the 
different voices would separate and fall apart. My memory may not be 
enough (the computer has 64MB memory and 533 Mhz speed) so I will 
need to install more memory before I can know for sure whether it 
will perform this well enough or not.

Then I tried the built-in media, and everything went quite well, and 
I almost have everything wrapped up and ready to go, but then I 
realized that there seems to be no way to control the volume of a 
player when there is no QuickTime installed? (The player seems to 
ignore its playloudness setting.) So it seems that it will play the 
music at the current Windows system volume setting. (The sounds 
played directly with play command can be controlled nicely with 
global playloudness setting.)

This seems to raise the possibility that the user may find the music 
blasting them out when they start up the program. It seems that I 
would have to have music turned off by default in order to avoid 
this, allowing them a chance to adjust volume first, and even then I 
don't think the trouble of having to adjust system volume will give a 
good impression.

Best possible performance without QT is important to me so that 
people can try out the download without installing if they so desire 
(plus I'm still not even sure if QT will perform well enough or not 
with the MIDI music) and the game seems pretty dull without music, so 
I'm hoping to find a solution for adjusting the player volume or the 
system volume.

Does anyone know how to change either of these successfully without 
QT using any method, native or external? Or other ideas? All 
suggestions welcome and any way to change system volume especially 
desired.

Thanks so much in advance,

-- 
Curry Kenworthy
--
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