Roving Cowboy's Explanation for 2.5.5 skinning.

Skinning Media Monkey 2.5.5 and lower versions is rather time consuming. it involes making a classic winamp player skin either the whole winamp skin or just the player, because just the player is used by media monkey 2.x

And you need to make some background images. they are for the tree view the list view and the now playing playlist backgrounds.

you also need the theme skinning engine you can use the same one for version 3 skins. but not all it can do will be used on the mm 2x skins

okay last thing you need to get before your ready is a copy of the default mm 2 skin file or copy of some other skin that was dexcribed as a full media monkey skin.

Once you have all that ready here is what you do.

1 make a new folder place all the stuff above in that folder.

2. make a new folder inside the folder you just made put all the winamp classic skin images in to that folder. so all you have now in the first new folder is the skinning engine exe and the copy of the media monkey 2 skin

3. now look at the copy of the media monkey 2.x skin it is a wsz file the same as the winamp skins are. you need to make that an zip file and you do that by just renaming the file and changing the letters from .wsz to .zip once done with the rename just extract all the files in that zip file into the same first new folder you made.

4. now double click on the theme skinning engine and start it.

5. click on the engine's menu bar word of " File " and on that menu click on " Open "

6. now browse to the folder that you put the copy of the media monkey 2x skin into. and tell the engine to open that skin file of theme.mskn that is the media monkey skin.

7. when you have it opened you need to go back to the skinning engines menu bar and click on the word " Edit " and on that menu you then click on the words "extract images " make sure they are extracted in to the same first new folder you just put all the other images in.

8. now close the skinning engine you wont need it for some time now.

9. okay that folder you made and placed all the new images for the winamp skin

that you made and wanted to use on this new media monkey skin? go in there and copy all those new images you made and then paste them back in to the first new folder so you now will overwrite the same images that were in the media monkey skin file, so only your new winamp images are in both the folders you made.

now look at all the images each one has to be changed by using the image editor to make them fit your new winamp images, as you can see they are done the same way as the winamp images. just there is a lot of them for media monkey 2.x

10. look and you will see the sdb_backgroundlistview image and the others. those need to be the same size they are there just change them to what you want to see in the background. remember you will have to read the fonts over the image.

11. now the time consuming task of changing each one of them other images. they all have to be the same size as they are so changing them to something that is visible when the player is small takes time.

12. when all the images are finished you now once again start the theme editor engine and open the theme.mskn file again. this time look and you will see in the tree directory of the engine the word images and a plus sign beside it click the plus sign you now see each of the image's names. you click on each name one at a time, and then on the replace image button, now you browse to the new image you made and import it in to the theme.mskn file thus replacing that image with your image. do that for each of the images that you made EXCEPT!! the sdb background images and the winamp skin images they don't go in the theme mskn file.

now save that file and close the theme skinning engine.

13. now take that theme.mskn file all the ini files that were in the zip file when you extracted it. and all the background view images. copy only those and put them in to the folder you made for the winamp images.

14.now zip that folder up and name it the name of your skin something like bestskin.zip is what it will read. you need to change that by renaming it to bestskin.wsz

15, take that new wsz skin file you made and copy it and paste it in to the folder for skins. in the media monkey 2.5.5 program folder which should be in the program files area of your hard drive.

16. now start media monkey 2.5.5 up and go to the options panel and pick your skin it should change to the skin at the same time you select the name of your skin.

all the fonts and stuff will be the same as the default skin. if you want to change the fonts you do that when you are in the skinning engine, where you clicked on the word images, in the engine just click on the word fonts and you can change all them there.

Retrieved from "http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/How_to_skin_MediaMonkey_v2.5_and_lower"

Notes: MediaMonkey is currently in alpha testing for version 3.x. Eventually it will become the main version, which means you will not be able to use MM 2.x skins anymore apart from the theme. If you are going to make any skin, I suggest it be an MM 3.x skin so there is no restrictions to how long you can use it for.

Good Point However

If they are not going to update their win9x computer to MM 3 then they might still want to make a skin for the old version. I for one am not putting MM 3 on win 9x.

and I don't think I am the only one that will not do that, so this lesson might be handy for some time. 8-)