Sibelius7 on Pi in 2023

Hi all.

Casually browsing through these forums, I see there was talk in the past about Sibelius7 running on Raspberry Pi. Did this ever come to be?

And if so, is the only source of Sibelius7 eBay and the likes these days?

Sibelius is highly dependent on a particular 4-colour screen mode. It ought to be fairly straightforward to wrap it in a sprite so that it can run in a window on the desktop even if it thinks it has the whole screen to itself, but this has not been done AFAIK.

I suppose there’s not that much demand for Sibelius7 on modern hardware, hence nobody has got it working.

Do I understand correctly that Aemulor is designed to run such applications but something with Sibelius7’s graphics/screen mode requirements stops that?

Sibelius was the subject of a recent ROUGOL meeting.

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

Ah yes. I read that article. The end result of dropping the Acorn platform and then selling the company has resulted in the current sorry situation – Acorn users long abandoned (AVID won’t even sell a copy of the Acorn version which apparently is simply in a locker in an office) and now the software being overtaken by Dorico.

Personally, I’m suffering from modern tech overload and for what I do music-wise, I quite fancy a return to a simpler setup. Sibelius7 plugged into my old Yamaha MIDI sound module. I’d buy a RiscPC or A7000 but everything like that is horrendously overpriced these days simply because it can be called vintage.

If your Pi can boot into Linux, I’d advise MuseScore – free and very professional. But highly non RISC OS, of course.

For RISC OS, and a little simpler than things like Sibelius, there’s always Rhapsody4.
https://jeanmichelb.riscos.fr/Rhapsody4.html

Cheers for the link. That’s interesting. I thought Rhapsody had left the scene. For me it’d have to be Sibelius7 or stick to the Mac for music, though.

@ Michael

For me it’d have to be Sibelius7 or stick to the Mac for music, though.

You can run Sib 7 on RO 5 on your modern board via ArchiEmu and use external MIDI devices via Rick’s USB MIDI, I use it all the time (and it’s particoularly nice on the PineBook that can sit on top of my music equipment).

I assume you already have Sibelius 7 release 3.5 (which works on the regular RISC OS desktop as well). If you don’t, R-Comp and CJE still have copies of Sibelius 7, I can help with the installation on ArchiEmu and all the required tweaking to ensure MIDI plays smooth.

If you need it for professional music making, keep in mind that RISC OS Sibelius 7 is a precursor of Sibellius 1.30 on PC and Mac, so it’s quite old, a lot of modern features we are used to have on the mac are missing. It is however far more intuitive on RO than it is on the mac.

For Piano, quartet and small orchestra (really small orchestra) compositions it’s ok, but if you need to write complex compositions like Progressive Rock, large orchestral scores etc, I strongly NOT recommend it.

On RISC OS 5 we have PMS which runs native and, has others have mentioned, Rhapsody 4 which is still fully mantained bye Jean Michel.

If you need to print partitures (music scores), I strongly reccomend to use Steve Friatt’s Print to PDF, and then print your PDF via mac or Windows.

Which type of partitures do you need to write, if I may ask?

Hope this helps,

Hey music publishers :-)
I have !Sibeluis7 and it’s a very good application, but since !Rhapsody4 works on my ARMX6, I hardly use !Sibeluis anymore (on my RiscPC).
I use !PrintPDF for document production.
The big difference is being able to work on the desktop with multiple scores and using the copy block if needed.
Another big advantage is the use of !SharpEye which saves its files natively as a Rhapsody4 file.
You can edit scores with several staves, attached is an example 9 staves (the score was retrieved with SharpEye)
I even had to add some without problems,
https://jeanmichelb.riscos.fr/Rhapsody4/LadyGaga.zip

For fun while I am writing my message Rhapsody4 scrolls the score while it is played on my expander with Rick’s module :-)

Feedbacks are welcome.

Paolo: Thanks for the emulation tip. I actually used Sibelius7 at university on a RiscPC. The modern scoring software is so incredibly bloated with features, like most modern software, when in fact Sibelius7 was plenty for anyone writing for live performers.

Jean-Michel: Thanks for the sample. Sorry if this is common knowledge, but is anyone actively developing Rhapsody4?

Thanks all for the responses.

Michael

but is anyone actively developing Rhapsody4?

But as I very often use !Rhapsody4 I always find bugs or features to fix.
There are still a lot of things to improve, for example I added a scroll marker, (not very precise)

I think Rhapsody4 has more features than Sibelius(?), especially for multitasking and is 32bit.
Take a look at the manual!

The best way to make it evolve is to test it and get back to me with information, I have had an English tester since 2018…this is a great help and allows you to move forward

Note : I tested the Windows version of Rhapsody VBRhapsody and found that files created with Rhapsody4 can be imported just fine. A great way to trade scores!

“download”: https://www.jolinton.co.uk/vbrhapsody.html

J.O. Linton allowed me to make his program available to Risc OS users, thanks to him.