Quickly write, insert, and edit short music excerpts directly in Microsoft Word. No switching to another program, no fonts to install, no separate music files to manage.
If you write music or about music ... Get MsLily!
About
MsLily provides:
- a panel for quickly writing, inserting, editing, and converting LilyPond music text into high-resolution images
- Pre-written Templates (just point and click) for blank staff lines, clefs, notes, time signatures, a piano staff, etc.
- fast, pixel-perfect, high-resolution image sizing and cropping
- consolidation: no separate music files - it's all there in your Word document)
MsLily is:
- Fast - brief excerpts take only a few seconds to write, insert, or change (see it on YouTube)
- Flexible - notate pretty much anything
- Simple - tested on children and adults, musicians and non-musicians.
- Active!
Videos & Tutorials
The tutorials page has a few videos for reference. For just a teaser, check out the playlist below.
Screenshots
MS Word with MsLily Standard Edition, including custom editor colors. Creating this example took about 30 seconds:
MS Word with MsLily Free Edition. The Advanced Editing and the Settings Dialog are disabled, and most images include a "MsLily made" tag. For well under three minutes of effort:
Requirements
- LilyPond - lilypond.org
- Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office Redistributable - www.microsoft.com
- Microsoft Word 2013+
- Microsoft .NET 4.5+ Redistributable
Unfortunately, MsLily currently only supports Windows. MsLily uses .NET and the Microsoft Office COM interface - tools that are only available on Windows. Alternative, cross-platform support is the long-term plan.
MsLily has been tested and is stable on Windows 8 & 10, Word 2013 and Office 365.
- 20180704 - both MsLily Free and SE: first full release - now out of beta! lots of changes, but the biggest is that I've re-written the data storage code & the way MsLily interacts with MS-Word. In short, things are faster and more stable, especially during cut/paste and drag-and-drop. There is a huge improvement in processing time when moving around multiple images. Added checkboxes for "Ragged" and "Vertical Align" Added Snippet Manager Tab. This needs a whole tutorial to explain, but at least it works. I don't like that it's a very non-LilyPond approach right now ... just name a snippet, then enter than name into the Simple Editor and press Insert - MsLily replaces the name with your code. I need to think a lot about how to implement this long-term.
- 20171003 - both MsLily Free and SE: a minor but time-consuming fix to ensure the version shows up in "Add/Remove Programs"
- 20170923 - for both MsLily Free and SE: a big change that removes lag/wait when opening/creating documents; clicking Reset now either clears the Simple Editor or restores the default code (alternates between these); right-click "Send to MsLily" is now a single undo step (just press Ctrl-Z once to undo)
- 20170920 - MsLily now for sale/distribution via Sellfy.com!
- 20170906 - MsLily SE teaser video released, YouTube channel started! Check out the playlist above. MsLily SE is up and running - market release to be later this month [knock on wood!]
- 20170802 - second beta release! Fix cut-and-paste failure when using context menu (right click); "Paste with source formatting" has no programmer interface, so it is not possible for MsLily to track the right-click paste operation - LilyPond code attached to an image will be lost; still seeking a workaround for this, but it looks like it may be a permanent problem Fixed cut/paste between documents Optimise image cropping (especially for big images) Restore "MsLily made" title text for image insertions (I'm really torn on whether I'll omit this again ... )
- 20170717 - first beta release!
