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LMMS Change theme – How to tutorial

LMMS change theme: LMMS is a very good DAW to make music on your own computer. And LMMS is FREE!!! (you are free to contribute to the LMMS comunity) Now the layout looks verry basic (and that can be good 😉 ). But some people want to change that to make it look better. And the great thing about LMMS (apart from being the best music software 🙂 ) is. That you can easily change the LMMS theme. How to change the LMMS theme? Read on…

How to change the LMMS theme?

LMMS change theme - how to

LMMS can be used on LINUX, Windows and Apple. I use the Windows flavor Version 1.2.1. The files we are going to change are installed in the windows programs folder. So to be able to edit these you have to be logged in as administrator.

To see the exact current theme folder. Click EDIT then SETTINGS. And then on the folder icon. If you scroll down you will see the exact folder. And also the picture used as a background.

LMMS change theme – options:

LMMS change background image.

The most simple thing you can do to change your LMMS theme is to just change the background picture. On the internet you will find plenty of usable pictures. Or you can use your own. A lot of foto’s are in JPG format, but you can make them into PNG verry simple. Just open them with Window Paint and then save them as PNG file.

Change ALL the rest of the theme.

LMMS change theme what else: You can change everything !!! That is not just the LMMS colors. But every visual aspect. How the buttons look. The SPLASH screen at start-up of the LMMS program,…

#LMMS change theme what else: You can change everything !!! That is not just the LMMS colors. But every visual aspect. How the buttons look. The SPLASH screen at start-up of the LMMS program,…

OK, this may sound intimidating. It works actually like building a web-page. You can even edit the mor than 900 lines CSS file 8-).

LMMS theme edit CSS file

To prevent from messing up the whole thing. MAKE A COPY from the original theme folder. And paste it under a new name. (If you don’t know CSS you have also the option to download LMMS theme’s that other people made)

Now in this (copied) folder you wil see a lot of pictures that build the LMMS layout. And you can edit each of these pictures. A nice one to begin with is the SPLASH.PNG. This is the pop-up you see if the LMMS program starts.

Editing the CSS file from LMMS

LMMS change theme – hardcore : The style.css is a plain text file. So you can edit it with notepad. (windows) But to make it easier for yourselves. You can use a text editor that gives this color layout like the picture above. I use “visual studio code” As you can see you have to type the colors you want as a hex-code. And in VSC this is more easy because it shows you the color you type. You can even click on the color and than you get a pallet to choose your color and VSC returns the numbers 😎

DONT FORGET to change the theme directory (map) in the LMMS settings to your new theme folder. Start LMMS over again, and see your result. 🙂

If you do not know CSS. Then you can find basic info about the keywords at W3School. They have also info about html and javascript. And all for free. You can do also exercises to test the effect if you change something in the code. This is also good for learning the skills 🙂

But again you don’t need to know CSS. You don’t need to invent the LMMS CSS code. You just have to change the numbers in the code. For example the colors are just hex-numbers for the RGB value. r00-g00-b00 = zero-red, zero-green,zero blue = black. Writen as #000000. And the max value is FFFFFF= white. You can just test the numbers. Or you can use GIMP (open source drawing software ) to pick a color and see the numbers.


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