JimH, yes I did try porting over some of my skins. Unfortunately because of some features the skinning engine lacked, I'd would have had to change the look, or abilites of several skin. Once I realized the you weren't going to be adding any more skinning features to MJ8 I basically lost interest and gave up. The fact that Winamp 3 came out recently with all of its great skinning features also distracted me from MJ8 skinning. In previous posts during the beta of MJ8 I have offered several suggestions for skinning features. Here are some of them:
1. Mega-Me and Mini-Me should have the same skinning features/abilities.
2. Skinning engine should have all the features that Winamp 3.0 has.
3. Mini-me skins should be able to display the left media tree pane, instead of just the playlist pane.
4. Instead of having to use standard fonts, include support for skinned fonts. This is where, with .bmps, you can map out a alphabet, and numbers that the player would use instead of a regular font. Quintessential, Coolplayer, and Winamp 3 already support this with their skinning engines and it's one of the coolest features I've ever seen.
5. When the mute function, I'd like a way to keep the mute button displaying the down .bmp while the player is muted.
6. With playlists in mini-me mode, there should be the ability to customize what info in displayed. The default seems to be Track # - Artist - Song Name - Song Length. This may be possible already, but I haven't been able to find out how. Personally I'd just like to display Track # - Song Name - Song Length.
7. When displaying the elapsed or remaining time, allow skin authors to specify how many digits are displayed at any one time. Right now from what I can see, MJ displays only as many digits as is needed (with most songs usually m:ss), but for instance in one of my skins I'd like to specify that the elapsed time be displayed like hh:mm:ss always even is the unused digits only display 0's when not being used.
8. Add support for Windows XP features like ClearType font smoothing and Alpha Blending Window edges.
9. Include ability to specify the background color of the currently playing song.
10. Include ability to change the icons throughout MJ.
11. Include ability to use the media library search bar in skins.
Also, here are some more general feature suggestions I have for MJ9:
1. Try to work out a deal to use EAC's ripping engine.
2. Add support for iPod.
3. Add an option for jumping to “Playing Now” with single songs instead of just albums.
4. Add option for displaying track info for currently playing song in taskbar.
5. Add support for controlling basic functions when MJ is minimized in the system tray, and via right-clicking in taskbar.
6. Add tool to help find duplicate songs in media library.
7. Move, or allow moving, search bar to toolbar or other location on the main window.
8. Add option to hide “Seq” column in the “Playing Now” and "Playlist" windows.
9. Enable more customization of the left tree panel, including being able to hide and/or delete certain parts.
10. Add ability to completely cache a song or even album in the background while playing.
11. Add option to auto collapse open left tree directories when MJ jumps to “Playing Now” to play a song.
12. Add support for MP3Pro and HDCD.
13. Add ability to view foreign language characters (Unicode) in playlists, media tree, and elsewhere.
14. Make new better quality icons throughout MJ.