The answer will slightly depend on if you’re buying a used intel mbp or if you’re getting a new M1. I can’t speak to sib on the new m1’s (I don’t expect any problems but I don’t have any direct experience;) but I can tell you that while I’m not a current user, I never had any issues running Sibelius on my older Mac laptop. The new ones are so much more powerful than that which I used to run that I can’t imagine you’ll have any problems.

(And fwiw, just in case you’re tempted for any reason, Dorico is about to drop a new version that is M1 native, and even the non-ARM version runs flawlessly on M1 machines.)

I used Sib 6 on a Macbook up till a year ago when I got Dorico, which I've been much happier with, but that's comparing a 2020 program with a 2009 one. I'm sure the most recent iterations of Sibelius are just as good, but I didn't consider them at all because they have been moving to a subscription model and that's more expensive in the long run.

I would recommend trying out the free versions available, so you get firsthand experience of what works for you. Sibelius First is free and only accomodates 4 separate parts along with some other limitations, but that might be your ticket.

To echo mrtaylor, there are free and limited versions of Dorico too. Just fyi- the working model is different and takes some getting used to. Almost everyone prefers it once they have acclimated, but there is a learning period for most people.

I regularly use the current version of Sibelius (8) on a 2020 MBP at work. Previously I used Sib7 on a variety of Macs through college and beyond.

Not sure how much profanity is allowed on here, so let me say that Avid’s stupid licensing system is an occasion for sin for me. This is not a Mac-specific problem, just bad programming and corporate greed.

Sometimes it crashes randomly, but again, that’s just Sibelius being Sibelius. 99% of the time it works beautifully.

No, the creators of Dorico used to be the Sibelius development team. Then the new corporate buyers fired them all, and steinberg turned around and hired them all to build something new from scratch.

I am about ready to jump to Dorico... I was (in the early years of the company) a Sibelius Ambassador... teaching groups in educational systems how to use Sib... but with their subscription only model (bah, humbug!), I am finally jumping off.

??????????????BIG QUESTION to all Sib Users!???????????

What do I do with the thousands of .sib files of my comps and arrangments?!?! Convert them to MIDI? Print out all the scores? Convert to XML? (I have sib version 6 and not sure I can convert).

I have also heard that the Dolet plug-in produces better results. I think they even discussed that on an episode of scoring notes.

To answer Francis:
If you have any intention of ever bringing those scores into any other program, then you’ll want to do that via XML. Midi is a very “dumb” format, whereas xml contains oodles more semantic data.

I would take your whole archive and back up the original Sebelius files, make sure that you have archive/reference PDFs, and then also save XML and midi files. You will want the PDFs because those are the universal document format and because music XML always introduces some errors and you’ll want to go back to an original copy of the score to make corrections. A MIDI file may be useful if you want to do a mock up in a DAW, and honestly, the file sizes tend to be so minuscule that you really don’t pay a penalty for keeping that extra format just in case.

Before I jumped ship from Sebelius I saved everything is XML and ended up creating new versions of everything in dorico. Fortunately, at the time my library wasn’t so extensive that it would’ve prevented me from embarking upon this project. I would have a much rougher go of it now since I now have hundreds of dorico files. In the end, I did reference the PDFs a few times just to make sure that I had everything, or because I wanted to imitate the layout that I had done in Sibelius before, but after that, all of my scores looked so much nicer in dorico that I have never gone back to those old files after four years.

The release date for version four is Wednesday morning (1/12/22), by the way.

Thanks all for your input.

I am going to take a look at my AllSibsOfAllTime folder and see how many files I actually have. From there I can assess which ones to convert to Dorico via XML... I will make a separate folder for that lot (Active), and then I would probably just PDF the rest and save that along with the .sib file (Archive). My files reach all the way back to the first year Sib came out, so there are just too many to convert to XML.

I often think printing to paper would be a good idea just in case of an EMP.

At the very least print out the stuff you like the most.

Maybe get a USB stick and label its contents like you would a packing box.

Don't forget the dead man's switch in case of an emergency. 2 folders shipped to Camp David, 1 more to the Kremlin and another to the Times, so the world can finally know the truth.

Holy moly!