i even tried to put in the apogee sound system for this purpose to terrible unstable results (involving memory and buffering usually)
The old popular solution was once to link with the FMOD library, but the dependency of FMOD runs into legal conflicts with the GPL and the "non-commercial use only" clause of the library and so everyone cried foul and we don't have fmod in anything anymore. This might seem unusual when you have all those Doom ports using FMOD and FMODEx out there, but that's how it all went down. The main use of it was underwater pitch changes and timescale pitch changes, since achieving TEH MATRIX BULLET TIMES was totally a fad in 2000-2001 when Max Payne wasn't out yet... though since then there's and .
Makes me wonder - how would linking to work out? A module player library used for sound effects, that is...