Sibelius at ROUGOL, Mon 17th April 2023

The next meeting of the RISC OS User Group Of London is:

History of Sibelius, presented by Ben Finn, Sibelius co-author

Monday 17th April 2023, 7.45pm

The Duke of Sussex (upstairs in the Chichester Room from 6.30pm)
23 Baylis Road, London, SE1 7AY
http://rougol.jellybaby.net/venue.html

This is an in-person only meeting, no Zoom this month

https://rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/

Sibelius is a world famous musical score writing program that was first released for RISC OS in 1993, having been developed over many years by brothers Ben and Jonathan Finn while they were at university. Widely praised for its speed of operation and the quality of its output, many institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music bought RiscPCs simply to run Sibelius.

With the downfall of Acorn, Sibelius was ported to Windows and MacOS and went on to even greater worldwide success, becoming the world’s largest selling music notation program. In 2006 the company was bought by Avid, and in 2012 the UK Sibelius office was closed down.

At this month’s meeting we are very pleased to welcome original co-author Ben Finn, who will be joining us in the (newly refurbished) pub to talk about how Sibelius first came about, what happened along the way, and give some technical details on its development. He is also happy to answer any questions before or after the main presentation, so do come along for a chat over a pint and some food.

We will have Sibelius (RISC OS version of course) running on the big screen along with some sample printed musical scores. There will also be a keyboard linked up via USB MIDI, so everyone can see and hear Sibelius put through its paces!

Note: This meeting will be in person only, no Zoom this month.

Directions to the venue by car and public transport are on the website:

https://rougol.jellybaby.net/venue.html

Only realised the other day that due to this meeting having been rescheduled several times, it has by luck ended up on the 30th anniversary of the release of Sibelius in April 1993 :-)

Had a go at 32bitting the Demo.

It seemed to run ok with VRPc DL RO5.x

Thought about trying it on a Ti – which I hear has a 4 colour mode.

IIRC not only does it need 4 colours, its rendering is hard-wired to 640×480. It certainly doesn’t take kindly to the mode changing while it’s in ‘Edit mode’.

Easiest to disable the bank switching and use a sprite displayed in a normal window, I’d have thought.

Tonight!

Report on TIB if you were unable to attend (and I believe it was recorded as well).

https://www.iconbar.com/articles/Rougol_April_meeting/index1897.html