I’m looking to have some fun with the Cartwall and change it’s appearance a little so that the players more closely resemble the old mechanical cart machines.
I’m curious whether I could make the following modifications (perhaps through skin.ini): change the spacing of the player buttons and add text next to each. As an example, I would like to add the text ‘Play’ (within a colored box) next to the Play button and ‘Stop’ next to the stop button. The buttons would then more closely resemble the old cart machines. Also, could custom text, such as ‘Empty’, be placed in the players?
Has anyone successfully completed a similiar look? Seems it could be a unique appearance.
Sorry: not possible. Button spacing is fixed, and (as far as I know?) so is the button shape.
Also not possible. The only way you might be able to do this would be with Screen Objects, which would require the Cartwall to be embedded. I also don’t know whether the text in such screen objects would appear in front of, or behind, the embedded Cartwall’s players.
Again, this MIGHT be possible using Screen Objects, but I’ve never tried to do anything like that (nor have I ever wanted to :D). Even if the screen objects DID appear in front of the player, the text would be there permanently, and thus either ‘on top of’ the title/artist text when the player is loaded, or just sitting somewhere on the player, even if it is loaded . Both of those options would look horrible IMHO.
Thank you both for answering… Oh well, it was a nice idea :-. If the buttons could be changed, as Charlie suggested, perhaps I’ll look for some larger square or rectangular ones that state ‘Start’ and ‘Stop.’
Sorry, forgot to say: button graphic changes DO apply to the cartwall as well as the main Players. For example, if you change the Stop button graphic, it changes the graphic shown on the Stop buttons on both main Players AND Cartwall Players.
I just tested some non-square button graphics. If you use a non-square graphic, mAirList will ‘squash’ it so that it IS displayed as a square button, regardless: so it won’t look the way you want it to and will probably be quite ugly. So: no way to have rectangular buttons on any Player. You can specify the button size, but it’s a single number indicating the size (in pixels) of one side of the SQUARE button, and before you ask :D, it’s ONE setting which applies to EVERY button in ALL Players and Cartwall Players.
Okay, I now understand that the changes affect both the playout and cartwall players. If I understand you correctly, I could add square (not rectangular) buttons, which could be larger but may be limited in size since I could only specify one size for a single side?
If I’m correct, I might try to find some square buttons to experiment, understanding that the change will affect all players.
Basically, yes. You can specify a ButtonSize, which is a single number, in skin.ini. So if you say (for example) ButtonSize=50 in the [Player] section, that means ALL Player and Cartwall Player buttons will be 50×50 pixels in size unless you override the size in the [Cartwall] section. I don’t think there’s a limit on the size you can specify, other than the buttons being so large that they ‘crash into’ other objects within the Players.
For example, in my own skin.ini, I use ButtonSize=28 in [Player] and ButtonSize=24 in [Cartwall], to make the buttons fit in my Cartwall Players. Note that the SAME graphics files are used: mAirList simply resizes them.
Likewise, you can specify a ButtonColor and ActiveButtonColor for each button. These colours show through any ‘transparent colour’ areas of your PNG files (see attached ZIPfile). You place the button graphics files in an images folder under your mAirList program folder. You need to create the images folder manually if it doesn’t already exist. This is also where you place any replacement icon graphic files for the playlist (see attached ZIPfile).
So again, in my [Player] section, I have lines like these:
StopButtonColor=#700000
StopButtonActiveColor=#FF0000
PauseButtonColor=#808000
PauseButtonActiveColor=#FFFF00
FadeoutButtonColor=#700000
FadeoutButtonActiveColor=#FF0000
StartButtonColor=#006000
StartButtonActiveColor=#00FF00
(you get the idea, I hope?) These lines also affect the Cartwall players; you could if you wish ‘override’ any or all these colours in the [Cartwall] section. For example, if you wanted Cartwall Stop buttons to be blue instead of red, you would add these lines to the [Cartwall] section:
StopButtonColor=#000070
StopButtonActiveColor=#0000FF
Bravo Cad! Thank you so much. You always go “beyond the call of duty” in your excellent, informative posts. Yes, that definitely explained it, perfectly in fact.