Wine (still) needs 32-bit MP3 plug-in from Gstreamer that the package doesn’t depend on in order to play MP3 in certain Bethesda video games. Gaming on Debian 11 GNU/Linux.

A long time ago in Fedora, I ran into a bug in Wine’s packaging and it seems the bug is still a problem today in WineHQ’s official packages for Debian.

I reported this issue to them in the Bugzilla a long time ago, and they told me to report it to Fedora, I reported it to Fedora, Fedora closed it for inactivity, and then it turns out WineHQ has the same packaging problem themselves. Sadly, even when the fix is trivial, I’ve gotten used to being ignored because the developers don’t have it happening to them or something.

Some Bethesda video games running in Wine use MP3 for their in-game music, and Fallout New Vegas and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion certainly do.

Fallout New Vegas seems to play fine if you don’t tune to the wasteland radio on your PIP Boy, but Oblivion is always playing background music unless you turn it off. The engines are similar in that they constantly try opening the Windows ACM codec for MP3 if the operation fails.

If you use them on Wine without an MP3 codec behind the ACM implementation, then eventually the engine opens too many file handles and then the game crashes. Happens after about 5 or 6 minutes.

So you need to install the 32-bit version of gstreamer1.0-plugins good. In Debian, you can do this with sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-plugins-good:i386 and in Fedora it should be sudo dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-good.i686 where i386 and i686 are just what they call the 32-bit x86 program packages. Same thing, pretty much. (Other than some build time options you probably don’t care about.)

I really wish they could fix this considering I reported it more than 3 years ago, because Wine itself isn’t technically broken because it _can_ work, but most people will have NO idea why it’s not working.