614: Sibelius crashes when displaying the Mixer on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Symptoms

When running on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Sibelius 5, Sibelius First and Sibelius Student may crash when you show the Mixer. Alternatively, you may find that the Mixer window displays, but is non-functional.

You may also find that Sibelius 5, Sibelius First and Sibelius Student crash on start-up, if the Mixer was visible when you last quit the application before upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Cause

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has a number of internal changes that affect how graphics, such as the various components that constitute the Mixer's appearance, are loaded and appear internally. A technique used by Sibelius 5, Sibelius First and Sibelius Student to determine the color value of specific pixels no longer works. Apple implemented a checkfix in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for all versions of Sibelius 5 up to and including Sibelius 5.3.x to provide backwards compatibility for the technique used by Sibelius 5, but unfortunately this fix does not work correctly, and Sibelius still crashes.

Solution

To fix this problem, download and install an update to Sibelius 5.4, Sibelius First 5.4 or Sibelius Student 5.4. Despite the big change in version number, there are in fact no new features or other improvements in this update, and if you are not running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you do not require this update.

Sibelius 5 users must ensure that they are running Sibelius 5.2.5 before downloading and installing the update below.

Sibelius 5 users:

• English, French, German, Italian, Spanish: Sibelius54Update.dmg (2MB)
• Japanese: Sibelius54UpdateJapanese.dmg (2MB)

Sibelius First users: SibeliusFirst54Update.dmg (2MB)

Sibelius Student users: SibeliusStudent54.dmg (34MB)

Simply follow the on-screen instructions to install these updates. For Sibelius Student, simply replace your existing Sibelius 5 Student application package with the one contained in the download. After the update has been successfully installed, the version number of Sibelius, Sibelius First or Sibelius Student will be version 5.4.0 build 1.

Further information

For more information about support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, please see this page.