five new skins for live 5

scifish · Post by **scifish** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 9:03 pm

as i said in a thread before, here are my first 5 skins for ableton live. i kind off reverse engineered the code for the ask files, wasn't too hard. now i can adjust all colours i want. the skins are particularly some kind of tryouts. some of them have a high usability, fossil for example is more a fun skin like laser. here we go:

freeze was my first skin. i wanted a skin that makes me want to do cold bright ambient, and here it is.

tank is very dark and eye-friendly. i love these camouflage-like colours.

logique is a tryout skin to port the colours from logique audio to ableton live, because a lot of people (me either) like the tan of this program.

milk is another grey skin, but very smooth and soft with pastelly clip colours.

fossil is a fun skin like laser. it's devoted to my favourite winamp skin, which is called fossil (seek on winamp.com).

download the skins!

just extract them into liveroot/resources/skins.

all skins may need some colour adjusting, though i have worked with some of them for some days now. my favourite for now is tank, because it's very eye-friendly and looks kind of cool. if you have improvements for the skins as such, tell me. i would love to hear some opinions concerning usability.

i built this on the skin files of live 5. i don't know if it is compatible to version 4, but i think so. another thing i have to say is, that i didn't encouter any instability using these selfmade skins, so the programm should work fine.

i will not tell you how i did this! in the other skinthread there was an official statement from ableton hq, that said, it is legal to make new skins and provide them for free. but it is not legal to make the methods of reverse engineering etc public, and so i am not going to do this under no circumstances.

if you are one of ableton and think this post is not okay, please tell me, and i will remove the skins.

and now go out and play!

best regards,
martin

Martyn · Post by **Martyn** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 9:17 pm

They're nice!

Thanks for posting these up, well done.

Youhave to use them for a while before really knowing if they work for you or not, but up till now I've still been using the one Angstrom posted. I'm still liking it too, so, for me, these skin hacks are more than valid.

Cheers

M

thx1138 · Post by **thx1138** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 9:28 pm

Top work! I can see myself using Tank alot.

grfld · Post by **grfld** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 10:14 pm

Thanx! "milk" is the skin i was looking for all the time!
Great work.

x/grfld

scifish · Post by **scifish** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 11:05 pm

one thing i forgot :

there are several parameters (5-6) i couldn't find out what they are doing. so if you see something pink anywhere (i did this to find out what is affected), please tell me.

best regards,
martin

LiveLong · Post by **LiveLong** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 11:41 pm

please remind me where 2 place the files, thanks.

scifish · Post by **scifish** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 12:20 am

just extract them into liveroot/resources/skins (added this to the original post as well)

mike holiday · Post by **mike holiday** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 1:10 am

cool thanks

serotoninsteve · Post by **serotoninsteve** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 1:17 am

Quality stuff!
Thanx a lot, the logique one is great at first sight here.

Greetings

pearsonart.com · Post by **pearsonart.com** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 1:59 am

Thanks Martin.

I've not had the time to tweak much and it doesn't look like I will soon.

Would it be possible to send you some ask files I've been working on for you to finish tweaking? I have an orange one in particular that is very close to done but I just can't find the parameters to finish it off.

If so, pm me your address or send me an email via my site.

I like the milk, freeze and logique skins. All are very usable.

If you're taking requests, please consider this variation on milk:
darker text and outlines for better contrast legibility, multiple skins in dominant foreground color themes (think apricot, guava, mango, seafoam), slightly stronger clip colors and white highlighted areas.

Thanks.
James

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 2:06 am

well done with these, they look very good.

I've been so busy with seasonal things & music that I've not had time for any skinning, so it's good to see other people doing them well.

I'm still using my green-grey one, which is kind of amazing to me as I expected to ditch it by now. Sadly I just haven't even had time to fix those damn too-light clip colours. soon though

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 2:26 am

for me, the tank, logique and fossil ones are too dark to use.

my current favorite of all the new ones people have been posting is personart 3.0.2

thanks you guys for working on these!

scifish · Post by **scifish** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 8:29 am

thanks for the comments for now!

to pearsonart: i am very busy either at the moment. the problem with adapting your skins is, that i can't load default live skin files, because the code is more complex than the one in my skins, will say i built this on angstroms green skin which he posted back a while - was a good point to start.

though you can send me some inspirational skins and maybe i like some of those so that i will built an own out of it.

milk: you think of variations on milk like i did with freeze? i mean an overall very fresh tan with the colours you suggested (mango, guave etc?). i thought about this, too. but i think when you have a very light tan, the clipcolours also should be in pastell colours.

those suggetions for milk make sense, i think i will update it the next days. i also have done some work on the logique skin with more friendlier background of the text-areas and so on. can you photoshop some of the colours you want for milk? just that i have got an outline. send me a mail via http://www.martindonath.com

best regards,
martin

Martyn · Post by **Martyn** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 11:48 am

Angstrom wrote:Sadly I just haven't even had time to fix those damn too-light clip colours. soon though

I've got really used to them.

Even after trying Scifish's ones posted here I've still gone back to your Green skin.

For me, these new ones are either way to dark with not enough contrast, or way too light , also with not enough contrast.

The green skin simply has more de-saturated colours, I think that's why I like it. If I could do one I'd probably desaturate every colour (even the bright clip & channel indicators) almost to grey but not quite, so every colour is like dyed slate.

I wish Ableton would consider making a small utility for applying our own colour choices, it's such a personal thing. One idea would be to have a skin file open into a swatch (like a pantone chart) and then all the user would have to do is double click a colour to change it and re-save the file. No need for it to be complex.

It's great that people are doing this though, hopefully it might go to show that there's definately a very real demand for individual colur choice, and that people can come up with perfectly valid output.

Thanks again to everyone having a go at this, dumbasses like me really appreciate it.

scifish · Post by **scifish** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 12:57 pm

i think you can't satisfy everyone's needs. i personally really like skins with low contrast that look very smooth, or very dark skins. i will do some variations though, partly with desaturated colours.

best regards,
martin