HOWTO_Sibelius_4

Introduction

I spent quite a while looking around as to how to install Sibelius 4, and the solution was pretty simple, it works very nicely with WINE. I've tried to make this as beginner friendly as possible, as long as you know how to open a shell and "su" as root you should be able to follow these instructions ;)

Goals

After this, you should have Sibelius 4 running with WINE and timidity. Other versions of Sibelius may well work the same way, including the new Sibelius 5, but I don't have any other versions to test this with. You will need to have a working soundcard with Gentoo already, otherwise this will not work. I am using version 0.9.29, though later versions should work just as well if not better.

Setting USE flags

You can first check whether wind and timdity are already installed with the necessary USE flags:

$ su
# emerge -pv wine
# emerge -pv timidity++

If the packages aren't installed or you see "-alsa" for either of these packages (or "-oss" if you're using the OSS sound system) you need to re-emerge them. With the appropriate use flags. Wine and timidity will both need to be compiled with either ALSA or OSS support (if you're not sure what one to use, enable both):

# echo "app-emulation/wine alsa oss" >> /etc/portage/package.use
# echo "media-sound/timidity++ alsa oss" >> /etc/portage/package.use

Emerging necessary packages

You can now emerge timidity and wine:

# emerge timidity++
# emerge wine

Be patient, timidity has a couple of dependencies which will also be emerged.

Configuring packages

Timidity needs a soundfont to run, it will install a default soundfont for you. If you want other soundfonts, you can emerge a couple of other packages:

# emerge timidity-eawpatches
# emerge timidity-freepats

You can use eselect to view and switch between soundfonts, here we switch to the eawpatches set:

# eselect timidity list
# eselect timidity set eawpatches

Next, timidity will need to be added to the default runlevel so it starts every time Gentoo boots, and since no reboot has occurred since this command being run, we start it manually:

# rc-update add timidity default
# /etc/init.d/timidity start

Now we need to setup the audio side of wine. Do this as the user that will run Sibelius, not root:

$ winecfg

This will bring up a dialog - select audio configuration, and select either (or both!) of ALSA and OSS, then save your configuration and exit. This is user specific, so this step will be required for each user that runs Sibelius.

Installing Sibelius

If DMA isn't switched on your CD drive, then the installation will probably crash out entirely. To enable it, where hdb is your CD drive:

# hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb

If you get errors, see the wiki article on using hdparm to improve IDE drive performance, you probably need to compile the correct chipset support into the kernel.

Sibelius should install fine as usual from here on as it would in windows, though I didn't try installing the extra packages that came with it.

Registering

Looking at it quickly, I couldn't get internet registration to work. Following the procedure through by fax and phone however worked flawlessly.

Setting up devices

If Sibelius complains about having no soundcard, go and check your winecfg again. Otherwise, you should see a list of timidity devices - select one, hit test and and if it plays a scale, use it. Sibelius should now be up and running!

Problems

There are a couple of problems - playback can stutter occasionally, especially at the end of lines, and sometimes the title page text doesn't display properly. If you can put up with these very minor problems however, Sibelius with WINE works very nicely indeed.