Can I mod a skin to do this?

[605Scorpion]

Hello everyone,

I used to use and love WMP11 but ever since I made the switch to Win7, I was forced to make the "upgrade" to the abomination that is WMP12. So almost immediately I switched to MM as my permanent music player along with a WMP11 skin (I think Morten made it) that's really great.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2006/10/25 ... entApe.jpg

But I really miss the simple "Now Playing" of WMP11. So my question is would it be possible to modify the skin to have a mini player that replaces most of the area to have a blank background of a set RGB value (or Hex or whatever MM uses) , with the album art centered in this area at 100% zoom. (ie not enlarged or made smaller) It would inherit the window size, position etc of the normal mode. Mock up:

http://www.fileden.com/files/2006/10/25 ... laying.jpg

The skin also has a miniplayer that I would prefer to be the microplayer instead. I bet authors don't have time to make an alternate version of their stuff for everyone that comes along so I didn't bug the author with this. I don't have much coding experience at all (took some Java back in high school, though I've probably forgotten all of it), so would a project like this be possible? I'm willing to learn a bit on how to skin and all that. Or is this something that would require a great deal of skinning knowledge?

[nohitter151]

No, with the current skinning engine it isn't possible.

[Mizery_Made]

I believe nohitter is correction. However, an alternate approach might prove fruitful. I'm thinking something like this might be possible with a script. I'm thinking a Web built panel like MonkeyRok or Song Information Panel could be built in such a way that it allows the cover to be as big as possible (since if you were to have a cover bigger than a reasonable resolution, then it would be near impossible to show it all anyway) or as small as it really is.

I don't know what the scripting engine may have access to (like if it can tell the resolution of the cover for instance). Another problem too would perhaps be centering the cover vertically. Not an HTML expert, so I can't think of a way to make the "page" dynamically as high as the window allows, and then centering the cover in that area.

But, going the HTML route would allow the image to be as big or as little as it needs to be, and not be restricted to one set height. Maybe? Then you would need to manually hide as much of the UI as you can (such as Now Playing, toolbars, etc.) though it wouldn't be perfect. Mind you too, I'm only theorizing here.

[rovingcowboy]

skinning is mediamonkey does not create code for the player.

skinning in mediamonkey only changes the images used by the code in mediamonkey.

you can do some scripting to get things like a lyrics window to work in monkey and use monkey's skins.
but it is not skinning it is scripting.

[nohitter151]

No, with the current skinning engine it isn't possible.

Actually, I mis-read your post. You in fact could create a mini player like this. I initially thought you wanted the regular theme of MM to look like this (not possible) - but the Miniplayer you could certainly make. Sorry about that!

[605Scorpion]

No, with the current skinning engine it isn't possible.

Actually, I mis-read your post. You in fact could create a mini player like this. I initially thought you wanted the regular theme of MM to look like this (not possible) - but the Miniplayer you could certainly make. Sorry about that!

Hehe, at first i was pretty bummed out but now I'm pumped up again! Great!

I'm taking a glance through the wiki and it doesn't look too cumbersome to get my head around... Does skinning require some wizardry or can anyone dedicated enough accomplish this sort of thing? Sorry if this question seems spoiled or lazy, I'm just not very familiar with all of this and it does seem rather intimidating at first glance.

[rovingcowboy]

monkey's main player and theme use the windows shell so it is skinning that with the skin,
you need to make a theme.mskn for that and it has all the same images you need to change which you will see in my fast newbies walkthrough.

the player is in need of its own player.mskn

the floating player is in need of its own floatingplayer.mskn

the two micro players are also in need of their own one for vertical and one for horizontal.

each player also needs its own ini file.

in my newbies walkthrough i'm just telling you how to skin the theme.mskn because that is the hardest.
and i show you how i set up the folder used in creating a skin. some don't use all them folders but they must remember more then if they would have used different folders to keep the items for each skin seperate.

skinning is simple its just the adjustment of having so many things to skin that takes time to learn.

just remember the players are all the same they have limits to items and size's but they are all made the same way.

if youre new to this i suggest getting one of my skins like jade monkey or the blues monkey and then take that mmip file and change it from .mmip to .zip and unzip it. now take the .msz file and change it to .zip
place it in the creation folder you made and unzip it. now take the different mskn files and place them in their folders.
i say use those skins of mine because i know they are from the old origianal default skin and have the stuff you need in it plus some more that was added in later versions of mediamonkey.

you could use mortens or nohitter151's but they use some more stuff in them that make it harder to copy and learn from.
mine's like 1st grade compaired to theirs, but do which ever you want they are all basicly the same.

the floatplayer if you looked at my skin's on the wiki you would have seen that it is the only one you can make with transparent backgrounds.

for your question of how much does one have to be dedicated to skinning to make one.
if you remember the old winamp classic skins. those took 20 hours to make no matter how many you made, if you did them with out any application help and used different images for each item.

looking at mediamonkey skins you can spend from 4 hours to 90 hours depending on how many items you change the images on and how different you change the postion of the controls in the players.

my skin of the bluemonkey is my version of a recolor of the origianal skin, and took me 4 hours to do
my concert skin took me about 72 hours with about 8 more for fine adjustments to the skin.
oh my times are exact times sitting in this chair, well the old chair i wore out i mean.

[nohitter151]

No, with the current skinning engine it isn't possible.

Actually, I mis-read your post. You in fact could create a mini player like this. I initially thought you wanted the regular theme of MM to look like this (not possible) - but the Miniplayer you could certainly make. Sorry about that!

Hehe, at first i was pretty bummed out but now I'm pumped up again! Great!

I'm taking a glance through the wiki and it doesn't look too cumbersome to get my head around... Does skinning require some wizardry or can anyone dedicated enough accomplish this sort of thing? Sorry if this question seems spoiled or lazy, I'm just not very familiar with all of this and it does seem rather intimidating at first glance.

It's quite easy (though a bit labor intensive!) once you understand how it works. I'd suggest you pick apart some skins so you can see how the ThemeEngine works.

[605Scorpion]

Thanks for the tips guys! I'll pick apart some skins and try to get some stuff done as time allows in the coming days.