On custom themes and the future

Audacity 3 themes
1

Dear custom theme creators and maintainers,

I recently wrote some new instructions on how to create custom themes: Creating custom themes | Audacity Dev
You’ll note that the recommended method no longer involves editing the imagecache.png directly, but rather generating it from a bunch of individual files (PNGs for the icons, with a TXT file for the colors).

I highly recommend you convert existing themes to use this method. In the medium term, the entire idea of an imagecache is going to be scrapped in favor of doing it the way it’s done in the source now. So at that point you’d just put the individual PNGs and the one TXT into the custom theme folder and load that directly.

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NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! I made my first custom theme like a week ago😭
Now I gotta convert it😓

But anyway it does seem to be a way more scalable solution so that’s actually pretty cool.
Maybe someday there could be a way to change the colors and icons of the program directly in the preferences menu. Of course I know that’s not for today but I’m sure that it would be a great feature :blush:

3

Is there an easy way to just change or set custom colors for tools or for the audio wave?
I know that there are some color choices in the audio track, but the new colors are dark and dimmed.

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I have just seen this guide right now:
Creating custom themes | Audacity Dev (gitbook.io)
Is working from the source code is the only way?

5

Hello,

I started looking into the possibility of converting ImageCache.png between different versions of Audacity.

I have downloaded all available source codes:

What I managed, I compiled with “THEME_PREFS” enabled.

Then I exported the ImageCache.htm and ImageCache.png for these versions.
3.3.0, 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3, 3.4.0, 3.4.1, 3.4.2, 3.5.0, 3.5.1, 3.6.0, 3.6.1
Unfortunately, I was unable to compile the previous version.

These html files contain complete information about the arrangement of individual images and color fields in the ImageCache.png.

The result is this Python script, decomposing the ImageCache into individual components and then reassembling them into a new image for the required version of Audacity:

I will be glad for your comments.

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Thank you a lot for that, @v.muller !!

You’d probably help out a whole lot of folks if you were to go through some older threads in the Themes category and update the imagecaches they’ve posted.

7

Hello
Thank you for the reply.

I would like to get ImageCache from all released versions
but I can’t compile older versions.

I have all these versions of ImageCache files:

1.3.7, 1.3.8 These official versions have ImageCache export enabled.

I compiled these versions with export enabled:
3.3.0, 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3
3.4.0, 3.4.1, 3.4.2
3.5.0, 3.5.1
3.6.0, 3.6.1, 3.7.0

Regards
Vaclav