I agree with Orlor, notes being cutoff/not played at all is a problem even in the live version right now.

maxplayingsounds=64 is simply not enough! Some of our compositions are note heavy and it truly, truly ruins the experience when notes are cut off.

There was a time we were able to manually change maxplayingsounds in the preferences file to 128 to resolve sound cutoff issues in one's own client - this only changed it for you the user, but it was a solution and it worked for anyone who needed/wanted this option. These days it is fruitless because the launcher or game (I know not which) resets it to 64 no matter how many times you try to set it to 128.

Surely it is possible (and hopefully not too much work) to give us this option/ability back?

If it is not possible to let the user define his own maxplayingsounds parameters in his preferences file for some reason, then please, I implore you, set it to 128 for EVERYBODY!

This is not the dark ages anymore - people threw away their 286sx PC's long ago! I'm pretty sure even a 5 year old machine with on-board sound can handle 128 maxplayingsounds...