I had a slight occurrence of that too with the game just got up and running finally.... what I did is checked the dosbox sound blaster setting in the config file, and then I checked the sound setting for the game. I ended up changing to sound blaster / sound blaster pro when I noticed that my games setting for the card were wrong I changed it match the emulator, and now all I get is one... maybe two pops at the beginning that's it. I don't know if this will fix the issue... but I hope it helps because I ran into too... my current card is a audigy zs 2 gamer; which is apart of the sb pro line... if your using another branded card like turtle or on board you may have to do some trial and error.

i think audio popping stems from having a computer not powerful enough to emulate both the game and the music efficiently.

That may be what frampa says, and I will now post some of my system specifications:
P4 processor at 2.26GHz
384MB Ram
NVidia 5500 FX with 128MB VRam
C-Media CMIPCI 8753

I will also try to switch to Sound Blaster Pro but I doubt it that it will solve the problem but it dosen`t hurt to try 😀 . I will edit this with the results

EDIT: Yes, it has worked, Thank-you Ydnar28