So I've decided to start using themes but, as I'm sure you all find as well, there's no such thing as a 100% perfect theme, so I'm also trying to tweak a theme a little to make it fit with my style a little better.
The theme I'm using as a base is
LCS' bug fix of Alber-C's Solaris theme. For me is 90% of the way to perfect, with just a few tweaks needed to get it there. I love the old-school, physical desk aesthetics, but I like the way that the meters are still by the fader. It makes sense to me to have the meters at the end of the desk if you're using a physical desk because that's as close to the sound source as they can get and there's a tactile element to moving the fader that just isn't the same in a DAW. Conversely, it makes sense for the meters to be in the same place as the faders in a DAW, because
that's where your eyeline is going to be.
The biggest problem for me is that it's not easy enough to tell at a glance which track you have selected. The coolest and most elegant solution I've seen to that problem is from
LCS's mod of White Tie's Imperial theme, where the groove that the fader sits in lights up. It fits the aesthetic and really stands out without being intrusive.
So I took the image from that theme, cut out the lit up fader groove, cut and stretched it to fit, and placed it on every iteration of mcp channel image that I could find that also included the term "sel". This accomplished nothing noticeable. Wondering if the problem was that for some reason the "sel" images were being hidden behind the non-"sel" images, I then made the fader grooves of all the non-"sel" images transparent. Now there's a very,
very faint lighting up of the groove, but you have to struggle to see it. I don't know if that was true before I took the last step.
Deciding to try something else, I decided to see if I could implement my next-most-needed item - a separator layout. They're an incredibly useful way to reduce faffing around time when you're mixing. So I searched the forums and found
this thread, in which the very kind user bobobo has provided script to go in the reconfig file that should create one. I put them in the rtconfig file, in the correct places, and...nothing. No such layout option exists.
So I thought I'd go for something really easy and change a couple of colours. I re-coloured the meter images and a fader image. But even that...nothing. There appears to be nothing in the rtconfig file that would override the png files, and the files with the original colours no longer exist in the new theme folder (which I have completely renamed from the original theme and which I've tried both having unzipped in the correct directory with an identially-named ReaperTheme file, and re-zipped back together with a ReaperThemeZip extension).
I can only surmise that the colour thing is an issue with it being overridden by the commands I see when I open the "ReaperTheme" file in a text editor, but I can't find any explanation anywhere online of what those commands actually mean or what I should be looking at to change.
I've read every link in
this how-to thread and, as far as I can tell, everything I've done should work. So now I'm lost. Can any kind soul tell me where I'm going wrong?