Mixcraft 10 display themes (was: Q & A).

[Guaresneider]

I was really surprised by the good colors chosen in the new 4K+ side of v10 default (dark theme)

Excellent definition and font size, at no time I have noticed eyestrain. The theme light is also very good but after several hours in front of it you can start to feel some discomfort, but it's normal with any light background.

Comparing, Bitwig is okay, Studio One 6 is defined but you get lost in it, Ableton looks like 1998, Cubase 2001, Mixcraft v10 a delight.

[wreck]

Personally I was not even going to upgrade until I saw the new look, like most I've been using it for years, but when ever I'd shared screen shots I would switch files to wavs and move into Ptotools. This comment will sound shallow and I apologize, but I was embarrassed of the looks. Comments before I would move were things like, "that is a such an childish unprofessional looking DAW". Or "my 5 year old uses that" or "my 12 year old kids band uses that. It just looks super child like". The new look , looks more professional and not like a kids video game. But for sure I can see why others that liked the old look would be happy to have the option to have the theme they like. I only upgraded to 9 bc they got rid of the terrible wood looking mixer. So the changes do help them sell. Last week I had 3 protools users ask what DAW the screen grabs were from. So my shallow embarrassed feeling of sharing is gone. Heck if Mixcraft keeps rolling so smoothly I may ditch protools and cakewalk altogether. Hope everyone is well and creating lots of musical magic.

[cactus-head]

The Mixcraft designs are nice and follow the flat design trend. Personally I like a little 3d and color differentiation between controls.

I've been messing around with the light design a little. I've darkened the tracks background, changed the tick colors, added 3d title bars to the windows and track major header and timeline header. I've also changed the vu meter colors a little on the tracks. I've added a "green glass" cover on the transport. It's fun. There are elements I like about the light theme out of the box but I needed some color contrasts and handle separations. I also removed the light blue borders around the windows and replaced it with a dark grey.

Over time I'll tweak it here and there a little. The documentation in the ini file and section layout is fairly clear that adjustments are pretty easy to make; so one should be able to add some simple tweaks without too much trouble if they're are up for it. Top screenshot - light theme with a few tweaks. Bottom screenshot - original light theme.

MC 10 light3d.JPG (319.37 KiB) Viewed 79165 times

MC 10 light-original.JPG (355.91 KiB) Viewed 79165 times

[wreck]

Looks great Cactus

[cactus-head]

Thanks!

[Guaresneider]

Thanks!

AWESOME!!!! How can I do this? Don't you have any video showing how to edit it? Thank you!

[Jpwnz]

Yeah I haven't had the chance to test 10 yet but I was really hoping they would have a 8 skin in there. Finding out there isn't one is going to completely turn me away from even trying 10. From what I seen it looks like an absolute mess. 9 was already bad enough with making everything super ugly and dark but at least I was able to alter it almost back to the way 8 looked with some tweaking and photoshop, but 10 is on a whole new level of bonkers. To say this is clean and clear is the overstatement of the century. Mixcraft was great at being the one simple and easy to use DAW. It was easy on the eyes and I hate the route everybody is going trying to be modern and hip with simplifying the buttons, as a graphic designer myself it just looks like were going backwards in time and going out of our way to make things ugly. Sadly I may just have to stick with 9 which is massively unfortunate because I have non stop issues with plugins crashing which for all I know 10 may not even fix.

[TrevsAudio]

@ Jpwnz

While I'm sure many will disagree, I totally accept your opinion. I'm also a lover of the 8 theme, and did you know you can select a pretty close version in Mixcraft 9?

MX 9.png (275.87 KiB) Viewed 79112 times

Also, if you have previously owned 8, you can re-install it. I have 8, 9, and 10 installed on my PC.

[cactus-head]

AWESOME!!!! How can I do this? Don't you have any video showing how to edit it? Thank you!

A video? Maybe if I got the time at some point. For now here's a couple of tips:

Any changes you make to your installed Mixcraft master files or folders may have negative consequences on the functioning of your software. Just realize this before you proceed - and proceed at your own risk.

ALWAYS WORK ON A COPY - NEVER THE ORIGINAL FILES

Look in your main MC folder in C:\Program Files\Acoustica Mixcraft 10\skins

There should be two folders in there: dark and light. Copy and paste one or both of these folders here and rename it with the name of your new theme. I don't know if spaces are acceptable, so to be on the safe side don't use spaces in the name. You can experiment later with the name and see if it makes a difference. You may need administrator access to do this.

For example, I ended up with three folders in the skins directory:
dark
light
light3d

In my example I copied light and renamed it to light3d. Open the light3d folder. Find light-skin.ini and rename it to light-skin3d.ini

In the main directory, you need to tell Mixcraft where your new theme is, what its name is and what preview image to use. Look in C:\Program Files\Acoustica Mixcraft 10 for the file named skins.csv. Make a back up copy of this file and rename it something like skins.csvbkup.

In the original file add a new line matching the format of the existing lines with the information for your new skin:

Code: Select all

SkinName,Skin File,Preview Image File
MX_Default,skins\dark\mixskin.ini,skins\dark\preview.png
MX_Light,skins\light\light-skin.ini,skins\light\preview.png
MX_Light3d,skins\light3d\light-skin3d.ini,skins\light3d\preview.png

Go back to your ...skins\light3d directory. You don't have to worry about changing the actual preview.png file right now. You can update it later after you have a completed skin. It's just a visual cue inside Mixcraft for selecting a theme.

If you open the ini file, it gives you a nice description of the layout of the file and the relationship to the folders that house the images for the skin.

Code: Select all

; Mixcraft skin file 
; ***********************
; New folders/sections
; -----------------------
; In order to make mixskin.ini easier to use and understand, there are now 
; sub-folders and sections.  To search for a section in the ini file use '*section name'
; for example, to go to the UI section, you could search on '*ui' 
; ----------------------
;
; Sections (WIP)
; ---------------------
; 
; about
; audio
; automation 

; fx
; mixer
; clips
; info 
; menus
; mtk
; notation
; perform
; piano
; project
; soundtab
; store
; timeline 
; toolbar
; track 
; transport
; ui 
; -----------------------------
; -----------------------------
; Tip: To find the start of a section search for *mtk or *toolbar
; To find the end of a section search for ~mtk or ~toolbar 
; - Joseph
; https://www.patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&f=Big&t=INFO  used for ascii fonts.

; globals: thematic colors used in multiple places

It's in this file where you will make color and image selections under the specific headings and subheadings. When you see a color indicator like:

solid color = 10

be aware that the colors are in RGB format so a single color is a shade of gray. solid color = 10 actually means solid color = 10,10,10 and can be written in either format in the .ini file. Also keep in mind this is written in decimal and not hexadecimal. You will see many paint programs reference colors in hexadecimal.

As a test what does solid color = 255 translate to? it translates to solid color = 255,255,255 (or the brightest gray shade - white). Non-gray colors will have three different values: solid color = 32,64,127. If in a paint program you saw this color in hex, it might look like #20407f so you would have to convert it to decimal each 2 digit value representing an R G or B

This is applicable to anything with a color:
thumb = 128, pushed = 32 etc.

From here, you make changes within the .ini file to the specific colors and image references under the subheadings. The images are all contained in the folders under light3d. Keep the images in a simple SVG format. There are various programs available for editing and saving SVG files.

SVG files use a variation of XML coding and don't actually contain color pixels like BMP JPG or PNG so you can actually edit the code inside the SVG file if that's your thing or you can't get hold of an SVG editor. Since Mixcraft can render SVG files, its GUI becomes scalable without losing definition.

You can use PNG files too, but it's not advisable as the file sizes will increase, you may get some shading on edges due to transparency and rendering, and you'll lose some of the scalability of the Mixcraft GUI.

This is a very general primer, but if you poke around a little in the ini file and look in the folders that contain the images, you should be able to start to understand how everything relates.

[Jpwnz]

@TrevsAudio

Yes, I actually made my own version of it which I put up for download a while back. The Version 8 skin did half the work but there was a lot of tweaking that needed to be done to get it closer to what 8 used to be. The colors weren't even correct which to this day blows my mind. I installed 10 and I have been trying to tweak it. Made some progress but there's a few things I am having trouble locating right now to change their colors. All of the images have been replaced to svgs which makes them scalable, but every time I try to convert the old ones it just glitches out so I'm just using pngs. Which honestly for my use case at 1080 is fine. That being said with this version we are once again losing the ability to replicate some of the menus. Just like with 9 where some images were replaced with flat colors, more menus have been replaced in 10. I was able to get the images to show up but without any way to have it repeat it across the whole program I am forced to just use a flat color in some areas.

Also the transport text looks abysmal, it's decision making like this that continuously makes me question the design team at Accoustica. I have time and time again been shockingly surprised by the condition they leave things at, and this one tops the cake considering how important of a feature it is and how you are constantly looking at it. I tried to replace it with the old font like last time and it just looked even worse so I will need to keep messing around and see what can be done. I created a new button for the recording options in the transport menu so that at least fits in with all of the rest. I'm going to continue to work on this and see how close to 8 I can get it to look. So far it's a pita. I thought 9 was bad but we may be too far gone now to get it to look as close as I'd like.

MC10.png (107.25 KiB) Viewed 79065 times

[cactus-head]

Everything moves forward in the world. Design is part of that. The new look matches modern conventions and is very pleasing to many.

You seem to have a pretty good skill set in making changes so the look is more the way you prefer. Since the interface is editable (with some work I must admit) what a great opportunity to come up with a design that is what you want. Of course there are some design things that functionality has to dictate - new options, functions, processes etc so one has to work around those, but your screen shots look like you've got everything under control. Why make it look like MC 8 when you seem to have the tools to make it whatever you want? Looks good so far at any rate.

I was able to get the images to show up but without any way to have it repeat it across the whole program I am forced to just use a flat color in some areas.

Hmmm... I think there is a "tiled" command in the ini that you can apply to an image. I did it for my custom menu titlebars:

tiled fn= ui\generic-title_jk.svg

You should be able to replace solid colors with a tiled image where appropriate.

[Jpwnz]

Yeah I am a big proprietor against most design changes. Unless it actually improves something that needed changing it often just comes off as "we are paying people and have to keep them busy". To me it feels like a lot of time and effort was put into the design decisions in past versions. (I have been using Mixcraft since version 3 or 4) But a lot less time has been spent in 9 and 10. As evident by a lot of the unpolished sections, especially when it came to the version 8 skin in 9. Which just seemed like an after thought quick fix tossed in to make people happy.

I suppose I could come up with a totally new customized look but I really liked how 8 was branded. The colors played well with each other, the buttons look like actual buttons, and everything was easy on the eyes. The transpose menu with the stacked information and drop shadows just looked really nice and appealing. I will never understand why everything is going flat and boring these days but since it's commonplace that doesn't surprise me as much as them deciding to make everything super dark. I guess it's supposed to copy a lot of other programs like Adobe who have opt for a darker color scheme over the years, but as the original creator of this thread mentioned, it literally feels like a black hole that is mind numbing to look at.

My biggest issue is going through the mixskin ini file and trying to locate what needs to be changed. At the moment I am literally just taking a screenshot and figuring out the RGB values for certain sections and then searching for those values until I find the one I am looking for. Would be nice to at least have a guide to know exactly what everything is called, as it will make altering the detailed pieces a complete nightmare for anyone that wants to do an in depth customized skin. And it's also just in general making it difficult because I have been up and down it a couple times and still haven't been able to locate a few of the assets I'm looking for. Particularly the time measure background color.

I was wondering if there was a tiled command you could use but didn't have any luck, I would love to know what that is. I am grateful the program is fairly customizable so thank you Accoustica for that at least. I just wish there was a bit more freedom because some of the changes seem to be hard coded in which limits what can be done.

[cactus-head]

Hi,

I posted the tiled command above; the command is

Code: Select all

the function code combination is

tiled (statement)
fn (file name)
= (assignment operator)

tiled fn= [folder path]\[image]

example:  
tiled fn= ui\generic-title_jk.svg  

[Thomas]

...as a graphic designer myself it just looks like were going backwards in time...

That's what I've been saying about the trend. Devolution. Whether or not there's a practical reason for it, aesthetically, it's going backwards. Where's the MC8 skin? In MC10, Dark should be relabeled "black". Too dark. Fortunately, Light is not too bright on my 43" monitor, partly because I have the brightness turned down. I guess "Dull" comes to mind. This topic should be near the top of MC10 suggestions.

[cactus-head]

I added a couple more tweaks to by "light3d" skin. It's coming along little by little. I added some texture to the backgrounds so there is some separation between the tracks and the mixer and "non-functional" areas. I've got to think of something to do to the transport. So far I've only added the green glass window.

MC 10 light3d_2.JPG (287.06 KiB) Viewed 78947 times