I wasn't really thinking of the global volume, but since stopping the song corrects the issue (resets the volume) then why not have the program do the same thing automatically at the start of the song?
Simply because of FT2 heritage. And also because the actual play function is too generic to simply make it reset the volume, this would break too many things at once.
I don't know, but I was thinking that the freezing problem might have something to do with the file browser. It's just a hunch, because I know that explorer really lags and looks like it has hung if there are lots of directories or files. Maybe I'm totally off course here, but it might be something to look into.
As I said, DirectSound is a 3rd party library and we switched with a major version from (3 to 4) in which the DirectSound support has basically been reprogrammed from scratch. But wait, I might be able to offer you a version of MilkyTracker having RtAudio3 support too.