[ngawor]

Dear Sherry,
thank you for your detailed reply.
Especially for the link to that old thread which let me discover some impressions of Mark's work.

And I agree, the pricing of Notation Composer is still justified.
I am a software developer myself (C++, Qt, Ruby...) and of course I want to get payed for my work, too.

I was even considering whether I could be of help in some way;
but I guess contributing code is easier with an open source project.

Yes I will continue to enjoy making music - usually with only a piano.
But to share my ideas I will definitely use Notation Composer to transcribe recordings to notation - and probably other software for the final layout.
(As long as there is no program which is equally good in all disciplines, the quality of MusicXML export and import is essential.)

Thanks again, and kind regards,
Norbert