SCORE is a scorewriter program, written in FORTRAN for MS-DOS by Stanford University Professor Leland Smith (1925–2013) with a reputation for producing very high-quality results.

Several publications set using SCORE have earned Paul Revere and German Musikpresse engraving awards.

[3][4] The core concept of SCORE was to break music into a set of items ('objects' in modern terminology) with parameters that describe their characteristics.

[6] The graphics plotters used for output were not able to plot curves so MSS did not use music fonts as they are understood today, instead using user-editable symbol libraries based on polygons, and text was generated from an internal character set.

[9][10] Smith's Woodwind Trio[11] was published using this system in 1973 and Richard Swift, reviewing it for Notes, drew attention to the 'admirable clarity and ease of reading for performer and score reader, easily equivalent to the finest examples of contemporary music printing by other means.

This new process claims the serious attention of commercial music publishers for its fine qualities, not the least of which is ease and cheapness of production.

[1] In 1988, Passport Designs sent their programmer Perry Devine to work with Smith to make the program more user-friendly.

[1] They also hired professional engraver William Holab (music editor at G. Schirmer, Inc.[16]) to rewrite the manuals, resulting in the release of version 3.0 in 1990.

[16] Ties with Passport Designs were severed in 1991, and all subsequent versions were distributed and sold by Smith's company, San Andreas Press.

[9] Version 3.10 was released in 1993 and replaced SPRINT with SCORLAS and SCORDOT, which sent output to laser and dot matrix printers.

[20] Version 4.0 (known as SCOR4) was released in May 1998,[21][22] and included automatic lute and guitar tablature systems, MIDI playback, group editing of items, a conditional editor, various user interface improvements relating to file access, and further mouse support.

[27] WinScore suffered from memory leaks and other bugs which prevented its adoption by many users, and despite officially being released on December 8, 2012, it was still effectively in beta development at the time of its last update to 5.01 on November 1, 2013, six weeks before Smith's death.

[7] Following Smith's death on December 17, 2013,[29] both SCORE and WinScore are no longer sold and the website registrations have lapsed.

[35] Version 1 was announced in the press at the beginning of 1987 with an expected release date of April that year, and a predicted price tag of $500.

[33] On-screen help was described as 'awkward and unenlightening', but the software 'rewards determined effort to climb the learning curve with powerful abilities'.

'[38] Writing for Electronic Musician, Carter Scholz found the interface of version 2.0 'opaque and maddening' though concluded SCORE was an 'amazing' 'power tool' which 'sets a new standard' for professionals for whom ease of use would be less important than the results which could be obtained.

[15] A math coprocessor was considered essential to prevent the program response being sluggish when handling the floating-point arithmetic for screen operations.

PC Magazine, reviewing SCORE at the end of 1988, concluded that the software was aimed at accomplished musicians who were prepared to put in the time to learn it, and that the design of the program and manual were thorough and clear.

[40] Three years later the same magazine described the program as having 'ushered in the era of true desktop music publishing' allowing musicians to turn out 'engraver-quality printed music of any complexity', but still admitting that it had a 'ruthlessly difficult interface', a 'confusing amalgam of command line and function keys' which 'never fully made the transition from the mainframe computers' where it originated.

Unlike most music typesetting editors, understanding and manipulation of these numerical parameters are expected of SCORE users.

To access the numeric parameters of items within SCORE, a user clicks on a graphical element, and a list of the parameters is displayed at the top of the editor - as shown in the first screenshot, where a slur is selected (notice the black vertical arrow above the staff at the beginning of the third bar).

[14] Here are selected examples of items from the numeric parameter data of the fugue example: The key signature: The time signature: The dynamic marking ('mp'): * See bottom right entry in character table in the first picture The rest in the first bar: The first B natural in the first bar: The second slur in the first bar: The first barline: The last note (half note, or minim): In version 1 PostScript text fonts were not used for printing, only the stick-figure characters used within the programme and an internal version of the Bodoni typeface, and text could only be edited by altering the ASCII codes for each character individually within the CODE16 parameters.

These are among the most notable: The MS-DOS versions of SCORE can still be run on modern operating systems through the use of virtual machines, though accommodations need to be made for their age.