I'd played all the way through Dark Sun 2 once before long ago, without the music. Recently I broke down and bought the original CD off eBay (jewel case version), and I was stuck for the longest time on the problem of the music restarting during combat. This drove me, a longtime musician and Dark Sun cRPG lover, absolutely nuts. Having an actual DOS machine, I tried it on there and STILL had the problem. 😵 I finally figured out how to fix it.

Leave it to a German site to scrupulously maintain archaic gaming material. I found the patches to the game here:
http://www.patches-scrolls.de/

I've also attached the patches here for posterity. I assume the material to be legally distributable as it contains no original game content and the nature of such patches would have to be 'freeware' of a sense for the community to receive them. These patches are not mine, and I take no responsibility for the consequences of anyone using them.

Now I know that my version was already purported to be version 1.1 or whatever (as seen on the CD title), but I decided to apply the patches anyway. One of the specific features listed in the bugfixes on the web was the music fix!

Copy and paste or install the patch to your game directory, then run the patch.exe command from DOSBox. The patch wouldn't apply on its face for me because the first file it looked at was an invalid mismatch of some kind, which caused the program to terminate prematurely and fatally. So, I dreamed a little and invoked the following:

patch /ignore

Which, I take it, ignores any mismatches. I ended up patching 5 files in all, despite ignoring 3 other invalid files. I don't know if that means some of the bugs haven't been fixed or already were fixed, but I will find out and post here if I encounter problems.

As far as the music, patching the game resolved the issue. The music during combat now runs smoothly without restarting.

Cheers