Just joined here

Hi, just joined the musescore site, and I'm willing to greet everyboby here, particulary the developers of this promising program. I'm quite surprised of finding almost empty the thread lists. Perhaps the site is new (?.. I don't think so, as musescore has been around for a long while....). Anyway, this forum is supposed to be for feature requests. I'll surely do some of such in the near future. But in the meanwhile, I'd like to tell my thoughts:

A usable music-writing program IS BY ITSELF A FEATURE that the free software world needs with urgency.

Nowadays the average active musician arranges music for himself and his band or orchestra, and needs a competent score editor to do so. This need is no longer restricted to composers or editorials. I know several musicians, friends of mine, which would like to switch to gnu-linux, or other free open alternatives for that matter, but I can't recommend them to do so (yet) because I know that this primary need wouldn't be satisfied.
As far as I know, Musescore is, the closest thing to "a competent score editor" that can be found in the open software world. In MHO, other alternatives are simply not enough by design for professionals (nted...), and other non-wysiwyg approaches (TeX-based) would hardly gain acceptance among non-geek musicians. So the whole free software movement needs musescore to improve. This is to encourage the musescore team: you're doing something important, and I'll look for a button to donate right now :-)

It would be also nice that the sound in linux were not such a mess, and that more specialized audio hardware were supported, so that people with professional sound needs could consider also to embrace free software, but this seems to be a bit more unreachable (as things are now). A different battle anyway.

All the best
JC
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