After spending a whole day trying to install Sibelius 5.1 & Sibelius 4 on a Win 11 machine, I gave up and dug out an old Win 8.1 machine. After half a day, I got it on and working minus the dreaded activation problem. This has lead to another half a day trying to get Avid Link to work on a Win 8.1 machine to no avail. I have managed to save some old Sibelius files as XML and had partial success bringing them into Dorico 3.5. This is with version 5.1 and not 4, which couldn’t do it.
Is there anyway of achieving activation of 5.1 or is this as good as it gets?
This won’t answer your Sibelius questions, but if you have files from Sib 4, surely they can be opened in 5.1, and you can export the xml file from there.
I would recommend you get the newest Sibelius version as a trial version.
Open all your Sibelius files and convert them to music.xml from there. You can also batch convert whole folders of Sibelius files.
It is recommended to also install the newest Dolet plugin, as it does the conversion much better than Sibelius’s built in .xml export.
If you want to be on the safe side, also batch convert your files to .pdf.
So once you start to import your .xml files into your new Dorico application, you have a visual reference to your music.