QCD Player Skins

CandyGlass: 5/18/2003

CandyGlass started out as a SysMetrix skin, and I liked it so much that I decided to make a QCD skin for it too. This skin takes advantage of QCD's ability to have multiple, draggable extentions. You can drag and turn on and off the playlist, EQ, and visualization sections.

Graduate: 10-16-2002

This is a simple QCD skin that is part of a suite that's comprised of various other skins such as WindowBlinds, WinStep, SysMetrix, and Rainlender. The main body is a small bar that can sit pretty unobtrusively on your desktop without taking up much space. It's still pretty full featured, though, and the slider bars for volume and position give you pretty good control over the player. There's even an extendible, detachable playlist that contains all sorts of options for searching and managing the playlist. The bottom of the playlist also has a button that allows you to switch color modes from red highlights to blue highlights.

CMX-5000: 08-23-2002

This is actually a port of an old Sonique skin of mine. With the latest features put in QCD B33, it was screaming for some of that QCD skinning goodness! Originally the skin was designed around a big playlist so that it would be easier to manage a lot of songs. However, you can turn the whole playlist area into a visualization area if you'd like. The equalizer mode is rather unusual in that it halfway covers whatever mode is underneath - either the playlist or the visualization. It's kind of neat the way it can overlap another area!

BetaMaxx: 08-21-2002

I created this skin to take advantage of several of QCD version B33's new skinning features. Primarily, this skin offers a total of 5 different extensions, most of which overlap one another to provide different features in the main window. The main modes are song information, playlist, visualization, and EQ settings. It's also got a pop-up search window that's accessible from any mode (Search - a first for my skins!). Additionally, the playlist's track background takes advantage of the new ability to have custom alpha settings. As an example, the font turns from normal to a brighter italicised version when you hover it - the background doesn't change at all because it's completely transparent. A really minor change is that the external visualization window now has a customized color and background. This won't be noticeable unless you've just started up the player and no songs are playing yet. Still, it looks way better then a white background would. I wanted to make a mini mode for this but ran out of steam. Perhaps I'll do that later and release an update.

Shex Satellite: 06-15-2002

Shex Satellite has two modes - a compact mode with simple display, volume, and play controls and an expanded mode that adds a playlist and more. Before using this skin make sure you're running QCD version 3.40 or better. There are a host of features available in this build that Shex Satellite uses, including hover/mousedown slider effects, transparent timer font, playlist font effects, play/pause combo button, and transparent playlist tracks. Everything's pretty self-explanatory but it's worth pointing out a couple of potentially tricky areas. First and foremost, click on the light bulb on the antenna to expand and contract it. The expanded version has a system message area that tells you what something does when you hover over it. Also, see the panel on the lower half that contains the play controls? The panel itself is the stop button, which probably isn't very obvious.

Shex: 06-15-2002

This one has three sections - Main, EQ, and Playlist. The EQ and playlist can be turned on and off, and the playlist is detachable so you can put it anywhere you want. It fits nicely either on the top/bottom of the others or along side them. Try spinning the playback progress - it's hypnotizing! I'm very happy with the way that this one turned out. It's one of those skins that I'll probably be using for quite some time without getting tired of it. However, I'm already thinking of a few things that might be fun to do with it, so may end up putting in more modes.

SimplexDK: 12-11-2001

Talk about simple - two colors and a bevel! I didn't want to bother doing anything fancy this time - just basic stuff. Except for the bevels, no 3D effects, no special shapes, no gradients or dropshadows - you get the picture. Oh yeah - no colors either! The main reason for this was to have a QCD skin that fit nicely into my SimplexDK theme for NextStart. By the way, QCD is so easy to skin (in my opinion, at least) that this only took a little over an hour - not bad!

Blip: 10-25-2001

This one has two main skin modes: the default which has a built-in playlist and the small mode that removes it to save some space. You can also toggle the EQ in a detachable window regardless of skin mode. Additionally, there are four color choices for each skin mode - Amber, Teal, Green, and Red. I'm pretty pleased with this skin - not because it's the most artistic or flashy one but because it's fun to use and is very functional. All in all there's nothing really fancy about it, so that's one of the reasons that I made all of the different colors available. Well, that and the fact that I liked all of them and couldn't make up my mind. That's one of the cool things about QCD - you can made several variations on the same theme and bundle them all up in one skin. At any rate, I refer back to this one sometimes when making a new skin as it seems to do a pretty good job of including all of the "essentials".

Black Banana: 09-17-2001

Still doing ports for QCD it seems. I started out intending to do a port of my Black Banana skin for Coolplayer. but one thing led to another and I succumbed to PhotoShop! I reworked the finish quite a bit - it's much more polished looking and now it's more of a gun-metal grey metallic finish instead of the brown. I find it to be much more striking, and the old one no longer looks so hot in comparison - at least in my opinion. I also reworked the screen area and went with a glassy grey look instead of a flat tan. The volume and position controls had to be changed too to take advantage of QCD's knob type - I really like that since it's not so commonplace compared to a slider. Finally, the playlist looks much better because, unlike with CoolPlayer, QCD allows irregularly shaped playlists - woohoo! At any rate, this skin has two modes - the first which is shown here and a second which is almost an exact replica of the original CoolPlayer skin.

Yield: 08-12-2001

This is my first QCD Player skin - a port of my Yield theme. This was really a blast to skin and to use! It's sort of like a cross between Sonique and CoolPlayer. I'll probably do more skins for QCD soon. At any rate, there are four modes for this skin. They aren't terribly different from one another - mostly sizing and orientation changes. Here are two of the modes. Note that the top one is using the external visualization, while the second is using an internal vis. The external one is a set of VU meters. The plugin source was available on the QCD website, so I modified the existing VU meter vis by replacing the graphics and shifting the needles.