Winamp Skins... Tutorial section

Winamp Skins

Skin Making Tutorial

Stuff you need:

A paint program such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or even good ol' MSPaint will work too.
Winamp's Base 2.01 Skin - to use as a template.
A good imagination ;-)

The process is pretty easy. Simply create a new directory in your Winamp\Skins directory. For example, go to your Skins directory in explorer, right click, and select 'New Folder'. Name the folder something unique, like 'StupidTest'. Unzip the Winamp Base Skin into that folder using your favorite unzip utility.

Once you've installed the Base Skin, you can look at the files in that directory. There should be a whole bunch of .cur (cursor) files, a whole bunch of .bmp files, and a few (3) .txt files. All of these files are optional. Any missing files will use Winamp's defaults. So, for example, you could just change one cursor in a skin by having a single .cur file.

The filenames for the cursor files are pretty self explanatory. For example, EQTitle.cur means that this cursor is for the EQ's title bar. normal.cur is the default cursor used in Winamp's main window. PWSSize.cur means that this cursor is for the Playlist Editor WindowShade sizing area. and so forth. If in doubt, you can just try making a major change to see where the change takes effect. Cursor changes happen immediately, there's no need to reload the current skin in Winamp to see them. To edit cursors, we recommend MicroAngelo.

Editting the BMP files is a little more complex. 'pledit.bmp' changes the look of the Playlist Editor, 'eqmain.bmp' changes the look of the Graphical Equalizer, and all the other .bmp files change the look of individual controls of the main interface [why we didn't just use a single .bmp file for the main interface like we did for the EQ/PL is a long story]. Once you've made changes to the different BMP files, hit F5 in Winamp to re-load the images.

Finally, you can change other aspects of Winamp using the three .txt files included in the Skin. After making changes to these files, be sure to hit F5 in Winamp to reload the skin

pledit.txt:
this file changes the font and color of the playlist text. The format is:
```
[Text]
Normal=#00FF00 
Current=#FFFFFF
NormalBG=#000000
SelectedBG=#000080
Font=Arial
MBBG=#00FF00 // this is optional
MBFG=#FFFFFF // this is optional
```
The [Text] line simply means that we're changing the text. The four next lines specify the colors for the text. The colors are specified in standard HTML-like colors. The last line, "Font=Arial" specifies the Windows font to use for the playlist editor. Be sure to either use a font everybody has or include the font with the skin (and have the user install it :).

viscolor.txt:
this file has 24 lines, with each line consisting of a RGB triplet and a comment, i.e.
```
24,33,41, // comment
```
These 24 lines define the colors used in Winamp's built-in visualization. The default viscolor.txt is documented as to what lines change what color.

region.txt:
this file lets you specify a sub-region of Winamp's main and EQ windows to show. This lets you carve out the parts you want to show, and have the rest be transparent. The region.txt is very well documented (thanks to Adam Kennedy), so read that if you want to do regions. Otherwise, just delete the region.txt and the default Winamp settings will be used.

So ends the official tutorial...

On to my more detailed view.