Skin Care ( Creating MediaMonkey and Foobar themes)

It's redundant and probably inane but if you wonder what goes behind themes/skins creation, here's my $0.02.



MediaMonkey  -

Now this skin itself is a mash up of these two (1 2) and as an add-on I've minilyrics (freeware) which displays synced lyrics as an overlay for many players and has a pretty extensive online database.
The editing part - which I'm learning still - is done by a dedicated theme editor. Now it felt quite novel compared to component/script based method of foobar, and once i figured out how to tweak every aspect of its look with masked bitmaps and other user created graphical elements, it was clear it will offer more 'facelift' for the UI.

Theme editor demo -

Foobar2K -

For more advance tweaking or the 'functionality' aspect of the UI, mediamonkey just doesn't have the headroom and that's where Foobar2K makes a swooping entry as the Big Daddy.
Just to show how much you can mutilate it, here's the 'before' version -

Now compared to skins by these guys mine has 'noob' written all over it, but behind their slick faces I've hit several usability flaws. Some are definitely better and would suit most of you, so look around.
Scripting has an integral role here, it controls many features in the program and even some components (or plug-ins).

 And that's the fun part!

To tell you the truth i had NO clue what scripting was, apart from my elementary C++ and Java knowledge i had little to begin with (infact that IS the prerequisite if you want to make sense out of it), but the beauty of Foobar is that you can look deep into any code, tweak it and see what has changed (or screwed up!) in the player in real-time, that way you get a know-how of what each line of code does. Just respect the syntax at least and you'll learn quickly.
Now to take it a step further make portable copies of the program (it has that option during installation), try out different skins from the site mentioned (in foobar, Skins are a zipped package/exported configs and may require additional components so be sure to check the description), fiddle around their with scripts and make your own Franken-Creation like i did!
Foobar has an active community and great 3rd party plug-ins (and here) support which can make your music experience a whole lot of fun (you may stop listening music altogether after all that tedious scripting).
The forums over at HydrogenAudio is a great place to learn scripting and other nifty stuffs. Some basic syntax/function is also included in 'Help>Title formatting'.


Now i can go on about how i made several little changes to my skin (sic) but that would be just worthless rants as you can do things in many different ways. Instead, if customizing how your music player looks and works is your idea of foolin' around on a lazy weekend, then try them out by yourself, spend some time with it and ask your doubts in the comments section, I've proved how jobless I'm so be sure that you'll get a response!

That does it.