Mac Audacity Skinable?

Hi there!

I was just wondering if audacity (1.3.x) for mac was skinable? No offense to the developers, I really love it for small tasks such as exporting audio using Lame and editing clips of songs I have made.

My only problem is that i think its uglier then sin. I have skinned Gui’s before (probably not in the right way) by locating the apps contents and images. There i could change the image, save it and hey presto! Customization! But when I look into the package for audacity, there isnt any image files (unless they are hidden?)

Can someone clear this up for me? Thanks

  • Sgt.Pepper

It used to be - for a while in the earlier 1.3 betas there was an experimental feature for this - but it was removed by the developers as they could not get it work fully.

There is some talk of bringing it back later.

In the meatime you could try one of the earlier Betas - you will need to look through the release notes as I can’t remember which versions carried this and from which vn. it was withdrawn.

WC

Ok, thanks for the reply. I will check the previous releases out. Do they work on Snow leopard? Thanks in advance

I can’t vouch for that - I am a Windows/PC person

WC

Rumour has it that current versions of Audacity 1.3 still support “themes” and that it is just the option in Preferences to enable theme support that has been removed.
If you obtain an old version of Audacity that has Theme support and look at the changes that it makes to the “audacity.cfg” file when auto-loading a theme is enabled, then you may be able to manually edit the audacity.cfg file of the current Audacity version (in a text editor) and persuade it to load a theme. I have not tested this on 1.3.11 and hacking Audacity is entirely at your own risk, but it could be fun.

I think 1.3.8 was the last version to have Themes enabled. There is a previous thread on this:

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/request-skin/747/55

PO’L

A little searching has revealed that you can change the look of the current version of Audacity, as follows:

(The path names given are based on Windows XP. Other versions of Windows and other OS’s will differ)

In the audacity.cfg file (in C:Documents and Settings<user_name>Application DataAudacity) find the following two lines:

[Theme]
LoadAtStart=0

and change them to

[Theme]
LoadAtStart=1

Create a sub-folder of the folder which contains audacity.cfg and call it Theme (C:Documents and Settings<user_name>Application DataAudacityTheme)
Copy the ImageCache.png file below into the Theme folder.
(If you previously downloaded a version of 1.3 that had themes enabled, this folder and file may already be there.)

Make a backup copy of the ImageCache.png file. (You’ll see why, below.)
Edit the ImageCache.png file to create the look you want, and launch Audacity to see the result.
Audacity may crash depending on what application was used to edit the ImageCache.png file. If it does, delete the edited version and use a different application to edit another copy of the original file. On my machine, using Gimp to edit the file worked OK, but using Paint caused Audacity to crash.

You can go back to the “standard look” at any time by changing the line in audacity.cfg back to the way it was.
ImageCache.png
PO’L

Hi!
Thank you very much for provide a way for Audacity interface colours change!
But unfortunately it work only partially.
Ideally i need all black background and all bright controls/displays, in conform to dark system themes look.
I simple invert the colors in png file (for test), but waveform centre line still becomes black, and some fonts/text is not changes (black). Please help me to invert these remaining components and turn interface to really useable.
(i’m use Ubuntu but think there is no difference from Mac.)
Thanks!

Themes are not currently supported, but you are welcome to hack or otherwise experiment with either the current or old versions.
Colour scheme support was very quirky, which was one reason why it was dropped. The current Ubuntu release has a usable colour scheme and I would recommend using the official release for any serious audio work.