My wife regularly receives promotional literature about this software.
I haven't read any of it for a few months, but if my memory is correct
it was written for the Acorn Archimedes computers (descendants of the "BBC
microcomputer" which UK readers may remember from long ago).  Archimedes
machines do not run Windows.  They were amongst the first to use a high
speed reduced instruction set (RISC) design and their graphics performance
was exceptional in their time.  I think that Sibelius is written to avoid
the Acorn's own operating system and address its graphics functions
directly.  As far as I know there is no Windows version - Sibelius is
normally sold as a package of software plus Acorn Archimedes computer &
printer.

Sibelius is highly regarded by many who use it.  It is very fast and I am
told that using it is almost as "natural" as using a modern word-processor
to produce text.  Its "formatting" capacities for music notation are very
sophisticated.  It can do a lot of very impressive tricks but as far as
I know it completely lacks the sort of musical intelligence that would be
required to extract one part from a whole score all by itself, although
it might be possible to do what Alan wants with "cut & paste" functions.
Again, as far as I know, Sibelius could not scan a score in and convert
it to editable form in the way that OCR software will convert printed text
into an editable WP file.  Musical information has to be entered from the
(computer) keyboard, note-by-note, or from a MIDI file, or in real time
from a MIDI instrument.

I wrote the above about Sibelius without checking back through the whole
thread.  Rainer Hersch tells us that Sibelius does now have a scanner
input capacity (which I find rather impressive, if it really works!)

I'm obviously not as up-to-date on Sibelius as I thought.  Perhaps I'm
wrong about the Windows question as well - anyone know for sure?

Ian Crisp
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