Sierra to Big Sur in one step

[cellio]

I have a new Mac Mini (yay!). My old one was running OS 10.12 (Sierra); the new one is running 11.6 (Big Sur). Some things are different and some parts of the transition were just bizarre,¹ but it wasn't as jarring as I thought it would be.

Except for installed applications. Back in Catalina (what was that, 10.15?), 32-bit applications stopped working. I don't know of a way to take inventory (one of several reasons I didn't update the OS on that machine). I used Migration Assistant to bring my existing stuff over to the new machine and then walked through the applications to see which ones would still run. Some, like Emacs and Paintbrush, I needed to download new copies of. Some I would need to buy new copies of (but nothing important enough to do so). Some are just plain dead -- no 64-bit version is available. In this last category are Trope Trainer, which I already had reasons to abandon that I should write about separately, and Encore, the music-typesetting program I use(d). The latter came as a surprise.

Solving the Encore problem isn't urgent but it is important. I'm not doing a lot of music composition and arrangement these days, but I have years' worth of files in Encore's native binary format, or in that of its predecessor, Rhapsody. (Encore reads both.) I would like to not lose those source files. Encore can export MIDI, but exporting MIDI and then importing it into something else produces poor results, plus you lose all the typesetting cleanup and text.

This is the problem with closed file formats. If only one program (or suite) can read a format and that product line goes away, you're stuck.

I already re-bought Encore once, when I moved from Windows to Mac ages ago. I reluctantly checked their site to see what it would cost to get a modern version, and found that they punted with Catalina -- their site says "don't upgrade to Catalina if you want to run our software", which was practical advice a few years ago but isn't now. So Encore is dead, it looks like.

(And this is one of the reasons I don't make major OS updates on machines I care about. Had I updated the old machine to Catalina back when everybody was pushed to do so, I'd have been left hanging with no rollback option short of a brute-force recovery from backup.)

I don't know what my recovery options are for not having to do a lot of typesetting by hand again. I will of course export those MIDI files on the old machine (better than nothing), but I hope I can find something else that reads Encore format and can then be saved as something more portable (MusicXML?).

I can, of course, continue to use the old machine. As with the last time I migrated to a new machine, I've set up the old one with remote desktop. As with the last time, I suspect that will work for a while but not forever.

Edited to add: I was wrong; Encore does export MusicXML, so that should give me a path forward. (I was looking in the wrong place.)

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¹ For example, my browsers retained their state, including tabs, but Chrome-based browsers (Chrome and Brave) lost their extensions. I had to look them up and reinstall them and then reconfigure them (and reauthorize all my userscripts). Firefox, on the other hand, brought its extensions over with no problems. All of this is data on disk; does Chrome actively disable migrating with extensions?

Comments

[cellio]

Encore doesn't export MusicXML, alas. I suspect the format post-dates Encore, but I haven't checked. I believe I'm looking for something that can read Encore and emit MusicXML, which I can then import into whatever program I end up using. I wonder if anyone's reverse-engineered the format and written a conversion script or something.