Ableton Forum

Hi,

These 26 skins were made by cross-referencing ask files from Ableton Live lite 4.1.4, the demo of 5 and an old demo of version 1.1. They look best in 4. You may download and distribute them for free from the following:
www.pearsonart.com/skins.html

All intellectual content is the property of Ableton. I simply copy/pasted/exchanged compatible code between ask files. This is not possible with all ask files and I do not admit to understanding the actual code. Having said as much, I've personally tested them all with no problems. No code has been added by me.

I used a mac mini with 10.3.9. I cannot guarantee that these skins will be compatible with other OS versions or platforms (although they should work fine.)

Thanks to Robert Henke aka monolake for posting his skins and inspiring me to give it a try. I hope Ableton will incorporate a skin editor in a future release. Meanwhile, these skins should provide everyone with a few more options.

Especially big thanks to Ableton for creating a great piece of software. Please visit their site:
www.ableton.com

I'm an artist, musician and teacher living in rural Ky. If you're curious about me or my work, please visit my site:
www.pearsonart.com

James Pearson
jp@pearsonart.com
www.pearsonart.com

10/1/05

Here's a direct quote from Robert's monolake skins instructions:

"How to install:

1. On MAC OS-X locate the Live 4 Applikation.
2. Select the Application in the Finder but do not
start it.
3. Actions -> Show package content
4. Locate the skin folder:
Live/Contents/App-Resources/Skins
5. Copy the monolake skins into this folder.
6. Start Live, and choose one of your new skins
from the Prefs Dialog"

Thanks for these!

Skin 25 is getting close to what I'm after, nice and cool, not too hard on the eyes.

It just goes to show, if somebody like your good self can create these using just your initiative, its perfectly possible for Ableton to come up with some sort of editor. Some of these are really valid colour choices, some of them better than the included ones.

Cheers, much appreciated.

huh didn't work for me.
anything i might be missing?
thanks anyway.

thanks for sharing.
I am also not too happy with the standard skins...2-4 i can use..
More the clear structured ones...
But i also had times where i liked the very colorfull disco one that disappeared a while ago..This one was good in dark rooms and distance and had a significance when working with many windows on one computer.

Skins should be standard XML. So we could build our own.

I'm glad if anyone can use any of them. I actually like about 5 well enough to use regularly. I figured it's better to post all of the variations that worked and let people decide for themselves.

I've read it mentioned that one could use XML to write their own. I hope if anyone does, they will post on the forum for others to share.

I'm not likely to commit the time to learning an entire program language. I've probably already commited more time to this than I should. However, I WOULD love to have someone explain to me how to modify the ugly default green highlight that Ableton has superimposed on virtually every decent skin with version 5. It's poor design in an otherwise excellent GUI. If the highlight could be coordinated with the existing skins on a case by case basis, or better yet entirely REMOVED (as in all pre5 versions), please tell us how.

I suppose the ideal would be for the selected area to simply be a few shades lighter or darker than the deselected areas.

Silly detail, low priority? Maybe, but I'm an artist and I am affected by these things. Obviously, a lot of others care about the look of the program too. It's simple enough to include in a future point release.

Regards,
James

P.S.
I'm far more bothered by the removal of drop menu's to access plug in presets. On a big monitor, it's completely unintuitive to mouse over to the browser window. Notice that drop menus still appear in other areas like automation? Give users the choice.

pearsonart.com wrote: I'm an artist and I am affected by these things.

Me too! there are colour clashes everywhere.

Good GUI design is an art in itself, and something I've personally never tried to do. Live's GUI is the best I've seen, but I can't help feeling that a little more attention to colour theory would make a world of difference.

Looking more closely, some of the skins in version 5 DO have selected sections appear several shades lighter and match the general theme. It just so happens that some skins I like to use do not.

I now think this is more like a bug/oversight and it will probably be worked out in a point release.

It's also worth noting that the code for matching and unmatching (green) selected areas follow different formats. Put another way, it's not as easy to swap blocks of it to customize colors and still have Live's appearance function correctly. I'm sure someone who actually knows XML could figure it out though.

The link for downloading has been changed. Here is the new address:

www.pearsonart.com/skins.html

I've also updated the first post. Please update your distribution information.

Thank you, very nice! I enjoy some of these skins on a Mac, but the most Live work I do is happening on a XP machine. Any idea on how to import Live skins into the Windows version?

Martyn wrote:

pearsonart.com wrote: I'm an artist and I am affected by these things.

Me too! there are colour clashes everywhere.

Good GUI design is an art in itself, and something I've personally never tried to do. Live's GUI is the best I've seen, but I can't help feeling that a little more attention to colour theory would make a world of difference.

All I can say is that Discreet's software (Combustion, Flint, Flame, Edit, Inferno) are the easiest to spend serious amounts of time in front of.

Per Boysen wrote:8< 8< 8<.... Any idea on how to import Live skins into the Windows version?

Answering myself here: It was easy! OS X and XP are not that different
I agree with Martyn that number 25 is nice.

Wow, these themes look great! Thanks for the link.

How exactly did you make these, though? I'm most curious....

Oh, and one more request... do you think you could just put up a zipfile of all the skins? Some browsers add a ".txt" extension to the download because it's an unknown file type, and plus, I think that everyone here is going to download all 26 of them anyways.