On v3.1 I had BorderRadius set to 8 in the [Player] section of skin.ini and all my cartwall and player borders had a nice round edge, but I just noticed (slow or what!!) that in v4 I have my sharp corners back. The setting is in the skin.ini for v4. Is that a bug or has the setting changed?
Thanks
Doesn’t work anymore for v4. In v3, the players were “hand-drawn” by mAirList. In v4, they are embedded forms and cannot have rounded corners.
OK. That’s a shame. It kind of softened the screen and made it look nicer. I kind of think it looks harsh with all the right angles… 
Radio Feng Shui ;D
BFN
Cad
That is definitely a shame. I think the rounded corners give the GUI a clean, professional appearance. Sharp corners look too much like the lower-cost/quality systems out there.
Regards, Alec
I didn’t know that rounded corners were a measure for the overall quality of a playout system. Come on, it’s only corners!
Sometimes it cannot be avoided that particular features disappear over time, in favor of other exciting features. In this particular case, the player had to be changed so that it isn’t painted manually by mAirList but uses the standard Windows/Delphi controls like panels, labels etc., while the player itself is a regular form/window embedded into the main window. This change was necessary to include the waveforms, the new buttons, and enable the brand new XML intra-player layouts: https://www.mairlist.com/wiki/index.php/XML_Layouts
I can try to bring back the rounded corners in the new design, but I’m not sure if it’s possible at all. The black 1px border in the new design is achieved by setting the player window background to black, and placing all other controls on a gray panel that is taking up all space, with 1px margin, so the black window background is visible at the edges. For rounded edges, there would have to be some other hand-drawn object in between.
Unfortunately the appearance of a front-end is also important in a lot of cases. Right or Wrong, but I have to fight strongly for some broadcast software (I work in TV) where my boss preferred the look and feel of software X where software Y was better for us. sometimes I won, sometimes I lost.
If a user uses a GUI for long periods of time, it does it needs to be easy on the eyes. Yes, it’s very customisable, but virtually everything these days seems to have rounded corners.
We, engineers like bells and whistles and functionality, for the money men and boss, has to look nice too 
Now, would it be possible to make the player background the same colour as the gray panel and allow us to place an image on the gray panel. That way we could place the “rounded corners” and any gradients on the colors. Just a theory.
There is no doubt here about the functionality, I love mAirlist and would love to see it gain traction in the US.
Form over function, I know.
But honestly, now that the player corners cannot be round anymore (it was a 2px radius by default!), does it make the whole thing look ugly? I don’t think so.
Regarding the US, I would love to see mAirList gain some more attention over there. Any ideas how?
I’m afraid I agree with Richard on this one. Once you’ve had rounded corners in your layout, square conrers just look ‘wrong.’
And I hadn’t thought of this before, but he’s also right to say it somehow makes mAirList look ‘low-end.’ Every high-end system I’m even vaguely familiar with DOES have rounded corners on everything Enco DAD and Google Radio spring to mind immediately), as do many pieces of broadcast hardware: mixers, CD players, etc.
I understand (with my programmer hat on) that you are using a standard form, but is it not possible to somehow ‘superclass’ that form internally, apply rounded corners to it, and use THAT instead of the base Form class for all display objects like Players?
In other words, if it’s not going to be possible for users to change this, I would make rounded corners the default, instead of square corners.
BFN
Cad
Come on, don’t be ridiculous.
If you think that the BorderRadius feature should be back - fair enough, I’ll see what I can do.
But please don’t over-estimate the importance of these corners. The default mAirList skin never and any (noticably) rounded corners. It’s all in your custom designs. Perhaps you should just reconsider your designs?
I agree with Torben. In Germany all the big radio automations I know come around with sharp corners: DABiS, Radiomax and even VCS dira! which is also used by the BBC. Thus I think establishing a connection between player corners and quality or popularity of a broadcasting system is somehow absurd…
Guys: I did not say that I equate rounded corners with quality, I’m saying that some people do! I have genuinely seen people make comments of that nature on forums about radio software; and all of them were Americans.
BFN
Cad
The system we use (an ilr group) Players have square corners while buttons and playlist items rounded, the rest of the gui a mixture of both. imho the layout not affecting the quality of the software, perhaps the push into larger markets Torben is looking for will come with the introduction of a voice tracking module. Edit 1Which I know is under development.
The software we use also includes a remote vt module that allows presenters to login to the studio from any internet connected PC and vt from anywhere in the world.
Now that is smart!Edit 2Though still a firm advocate of in mAirList
Just found this topic, and the interesting discussion, I understand both sides.
As a workaround, I remember the one we had to use before mAirList supported rounded corners. The corners were drawn in the background within a picture and the player is placed above.
The only thing needed is players that don’t have any border, so if you need 2px radius, you just reduce the size of the player by 4px in height and width (2px top + 2px bottom, etc.) In your background image you use the same color as the players are.
Now they should look like they have rounded corners. The only disadvantage I see is slightly smaller space to place the the time, artist, song, etc. Therefor we have fancy rounded corners.
Torben, would that work?
Cheers
Malte
I’m sorry that I’ve missed this lively discussion ;). Please don’t think that I was being critical of mAirList. I definitely was not. I was just saying that the more expensive systems seem to have rounded features, and the lower cost systems have square, flat features. Of course, there are expensive, high-end systems (Nexgen) that have a rather dull GUI. I was NOT stating that the quality of mAirList is now diminished. mAirList is a fine software, even without it’s round corners
In fact, given the options for customizations of the GUI, I would say this specific feature (the rounded corners) is not too important to the overall layout of the GUI. But it is true that “form” and sleekness do factor into the buying decision.
Regards, Alec
I’ve been busy for a while then travelled to the UK last week!
I think once Voice-tracking is released, then i may be able to get some article in a trade mag. They showed some interest in one about my little net station. (I’ve written for TV trade publications before so have a very small “in” )
One thing about US radio is that despite the 14,000+ licensed stations, it ranges from the small mom and pop station where the owners do everything and no engineering assistance to the full top markets clusters with a good engineering team.
I did show an friend of mine who is a Chief Engineer at a small cluster here and he liked the concept of mAirlist, but he felt that it needed to have VT at least before it could gain any traction here. He was also a little concerned on he amount of configuration etc, and yes, the look and feel is very important here. Mileage varies from station to station and the people involved though.
[quote=“Torben, post:10, topic:7605”]Come on, don’t be ridiculous.
If you think that the BorderRadius feature should be back - fair enough, I’ll see what I can do.
But please don’t over-estimate the importance of these corners. The default mAirList skin never and any (noticably) rounded corners. It’s all in your custom designs. Perhaps you should just reconsider your designs?[/quote]
If I could use a graphic file as background to the buttons, and therefore add my own “rounded” corners and shiny/glassy/gradient look then I think we’re winning! 
I think, in addition to the voice-tracking features - the basic mAirList demo/package needs a couple of good skin layouts to tempt people. It’s all very well having it totally configurable but what most people (ie: the bean-counters) want is a to be amazed and the jocks want something that is easy to use and understand.
Torben has stated that he’s not a keen GUI programmer, that’s fair enough - but I do find the basic/default layout a bit “boring” and unless these “mom and pop” or “big cluster” stations have time to spare (which most don’t), they won’t want to faff about with skin.ini and HTML colours - Rounded corners could be a whole day’s worth of converstation
What we probably need is a service where people can upload their skins, and other people can browse and download them. Theming.
Torben, we already had that here in the forum and also somewhere in an older Version of the Wiki.
Both seem to be dead.