Just started the Roman campaign. The music started playing as it should. It goes on for like 2 or 3 minutes and that's it - no more music.
My OS: Windows 7 SP1 64-bit.

Does anyone have an idea how to fix this?

mine is doing this too, it plays one of the roman nations tracks, no matter what nation you pick, and then goes silent after that. I loved some of the themes for the other nations, so this is a real pity.

just out of interest for the couple of things I tried, I tried setting the audio to nation only music in the settings and that didn't change it either.

This is even common on the hardcopy too.

In fact the setting is not saved at all in that particular option tab. I tried it several times and it reset to the old setting. Same goes for the "mouse pointer" option. It does reset too. The other option tabs are saved properly.

As a placeholder, I extracted the soudtrack and play it with VLC while playing. Those who have the original CD's can also create a playlist by nation ?

you don't need the original CD, the music is in the MUSIC Folder in the Settlers 3 folder. They are grouped by nation, so just pick the 3 that apply to your nation and set it on a loop, if that is what you want. Only trouble I found is I couldn't alt tab out of the game to start it, so I had to keep it going while the first music was playing.

You can't alt-tab the game but you can use ctrl-alt-del. Or, If you have multimedia buttons on your keyboard, use the free player "foobar 2000", it works well even when Foobar is not the main task. simply push play when the first music is over !

Last time I looked up this issue IIRC It's something to do with the system the game uses to cue the music not being a part of Windows anymore. Guess It could be fixable if you hacked in a different way of cueing the tracks. People can do that right?

Please fix that, without the music it's only half the fun..

indeed, the game had the music in form of normal audio tracks on CD, like music albums, not mp3 or whatever. but in times of windows vista and 7 (maybe xp too) it cant play the tracks right, just the first one. dont know if its possible to tell the game to use mp3's.

I hope this gets sorted soon! As long as the problem persists, i'll hold onto my money... ;)

Has there been any progress?

My copy does not stop playing the music, but it seems it does not play all of the available tracks. I tried setting to Nation Only music, but it didn't save this setting.
I played with regedit:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Bluebyte\Siedler3\1.0\General

Setting CDAudio to 1, instead of 2.

Now for every nation I have different music, but a wrong one. For example, Romans get the Asian music. I suppose this problem can somehow be related.