Music as a special interest?

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Love it. Always have done and couldn't live without it.
Mostly organ and harpsichord music, especially Bach & Buxtehude, and generally that type which gets lumped under "Baroque".

I crammed all of Buxtehude's organ works onto my mp3 player for use while commuting by train to/from a job some time ago, and listened to nothing else on those journeys for about six years. Sometimes I'd take the scores for a few selected pieces along with me to read.
So, I know them pretty well.

I have a kind-of photographic memory for music and once I've "recorded" something by listening to it a few times, I can internally play it back note-perfect and complete for months afterwards. Sometimes it fades and I skip a few bars, but taking a "refresher" by listening to it again for real fills in the holes quickly. Bit like recharging a musical battery, I guess.
If only I could remember the names of pieces just as well. I know immediately if I've heard it before and the structure of the whole piece becomes clear at once - but the name takes more digging out. Dammit.

I play bass guitar, and I have a storehouse of knowledge about classic rock. This makes people more impressed than creeped out by my interest. As someone said, VERY NT-friendly. Finding people with musical obsessions is actually pretty easy.

I was once obsessed with listening, much like the OP. Before CD's! I used to spend a lot of money on used and cut-out albums, walking back to my car with armloads of music.

Around 1989, I started writing and recording my own songs, multi-tracking using two cassette decks. That was pretty much the beginning of the end of my "listening" obsession. Within a few years, I had upgraded to a four track cassette, and slowly began to add and upgrade equipment over the next couple of decades.

Now I'm running a totally digital home based Pro Tools studio, and whenever I'm doing anything with music, it's with my own. When I do have the time to work on it, I've got so many ideas and samples recorded that I can work with, I don't have time to listen or collect anyone else's music anymore.

It really wasn't until I was around thirty or so (1990) that I realized how important music had always been to me. I write mainly rock songs, but the first indicator that I had any musical inclination at all was when I was around six, wrote down and learned the words to "The Three Bells" on an Andy Williams album. I remember that was the first time I ever noticed that songs had structures (as in verses, choruses and bridges). It fascinated me.

Twenty five years later I was doing it myself even though I could barely play the guitar. I still don't play well, but I can write a decent song. I've written about fifty or sixty of them, and have the seeds for many others laying around on my various computers and a Zoom recorder.

No question now that music really does "define" me, and is the one special interest (of which I actually have many), that has remained the one constant "nag" through all of my life. No matter what else I do, music pulls me back to it like a magnet.

Cakewalk is pretty good and covers the basic angles quite well, although certainly not to the same depth and standard of Sibelius.
I use Cakewalk regularly, mostly as a means of entering music via the staff editor, and it's quite easy to have it record stuff you play on a MIDI keyboard which can then be tweaked using the staff editor.
Plus, it's considerably cheaper than Sibelius and does pop up on EBay from time to time.

OP, I am EXACTLY the same. Except I wouldn't touch a radio with a 6 mile pole.

My interest in music defines my personality.

I love music! I'd call it an interest, but not a special interest (as in "Many Aspies have special interests.") unless you're interested in music that's very different from the kind NTs who are the same gender and age listen to.