I remember when I played this years ago that it had some great in game music, it appears to be missing. Does anyone else have this problem?

Thank you for your help and assistance with this snarky bug. As for the first of the solutions you provided, I did already attempted changing the file attributes to "read only". As expected, the redbook audio flag does not change, but the game still has no in-game music. As for VirtualCloneDrive, I already have VirtualCloneDrive installed so that is not helping with anything. And finally, I tried changing my Surface Pro 4 to 16-bit, 44.1 KHz sampling (the default is 24-bit, 48 KHz) and the music still does not play. I am just using either the standard built-in speaker output or the headphone jack on my Surface; I am not using HDMI, DisplayPort or S/PDIF digital audio. I have many other old games from GOG (e.g. Starfleet Academy, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Caesar 3) and from my own library (Heroes of Might and Magic 3 with HD mod) and there are no such problems.

Bingo! I think I found it. The music option itself is showing itself as off in-game. I toggle it, but it remains dimmed and unselected as shown no matter what. Even though the Redbook audio setting is persisting in the user profile configuration file, the game is refusing to enable in-game music.

So how do I get around this, then?

If you are referring to the userprofile.txt file's UseRedbookAudio flag, I already changed it to "Yes" and set the file to read only. Here it is. Is there something else besides this? Yet the game still shows it grayed out. I can change the music setting temporarily to on in-game (the userprofile.txt is read-only and keeps its setting), but music is never heard and as soon as I switch back to either the menu or a playthrough or try selecting a track, the setting shows it is grayed out again.

I am running from the GOG shortcut and not directly from the executable.

Sorry if you didn't see my edits ;)

Did you check for directplay?

Try with the ctp2.exe instead

And the only differences I see are the following:

ScreenResWidth=800
ScreenResHeight=600
AlienEndGame=No

ok resolution shall not matter :D
and what AlienEndGame got to say, no idea in the moment

EDIT: I just see something with on dll......if I coudl remember where I have seen here on GOG something about this......(winmm.dll)


EDIT2: found it

https://www.gog.com/forum/battle_isle/windows_10_cant_launch_the_game/post15

see if this helps......

I already installed DirectPlay for another game from GOG but I checked and it is still enabled.

I will try running directly from the exe and see if that works. (EDIT: No, it doesn't work.)

I tried replacing the winmm.dll file (I kept the original for safe keeping, renaming it winmm.dll.OLD) with the one from Mega at the thread you pointed to. I first tried it with its original name (sound.dll) and then I tried renaming it to winmm.dll. Both did not work.

I will also try installing it on my other PC here next to me. It is a desktop I remote into (use a headless adapter since I have no monitor) with Steam In-Home Streaming, which could very well crash or not work for this old of a game. But it could be the install is bad. (EDIT: Still working on this. Will reply in a couple minutes. EDIT2: Still no music. So it is common to both. This other system has a GTX 1080 and the intro movie sound and sound effects are working. I wonder what could be causing this?!)

I also tried disabling my anti-virus (Avast) and disabling VirtualCloneDrive. It still doesn't work. (Both are now reenabled.)

Hello. For me this started the music in the game. Unfortunately after one song it stops, when playing the cd in a music player it works just fine, so scratches ore something are not the problem . Any ideas would be welcome. Other hand, game still alright to play.

Ps If anybody has their video card blown out for some reason, this works on a card with zero vram (instead of the 4 mb stated in the min. specs) like my onboard card is, just in lowest res. of course.

I just use (VLC) music player as boundground ambiance, the tracks are here: ctp2_program -> ctp.

Surely it's not that matching to the in-game development, but after a quick assessment of effort and yield, this solution works fine. I was there for three hours and it was time-warping.

Additional, the playlist lasts 30 minutes, so you have a background time counter.

You've tried valiantly to get this working. I just purchased the game and was saddned to not hear any music. My far older brother used to play this when I was a kid. The music makes up a huge chunk of the overall art work imo.

i'm playing this on Android using a windows emulator, lots of fiddling but it works well, mostly. Quite fun. Hopefully some legend finds a solution because it just isn't the same without the sweet sweet music.

Installing unofficial Call to Power II SDL2 port [1] solved the problem for me.
Music is crackling sometimes, but working.

There's also a very hidden post [2] about this port on GOG forums, hehe.

Here's the download links from GitHub [3], and BitBucket [4] if the original posts somehow get borked.

Sorry for janky links, GOG forbids me to post URLs for some reason.

[1] forums.civfanatics.com/threads/call-to-power-2-sdl2-port-for-modern-windows-linux-macos.688176
[2] www.gog.com/forum/call_to_power_2/civilization_call_to_power_communities_resources/post2
[3] github.com/atsb/call-to-power-2-sdl
[4] bitbucket.org/call-to-power-ii/ctp2/downloads