Please excuse my exasperation. I thought this would be the Saviour I had been waiting for but no.
Please refer to this thread I posted in the Features and Ideas section.
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Please-bring-back-coloured-strips-in-Tungsten-m3429609.aspx
 
I showed a mockup of what I need my SONAR to look like. It got massive support form SONAR users and absolutely no response from Cakewalk. The basic feature in a nutshell is to take the dark Tungsten theme and bring back coloured strips, which are absolutely essential in large projects, but those coloured strips would be darker than the pale versions in Mercury.
 
I thought that the new Theme Editor would solve this issue. Not only does this feature appear to be completely missing, but it's actually worse than that.
        
There is a big difference between Mercury and Tungsten, not only in colours and images. Mercury offers coloured strips and Tungsten doesn't. But I want my coloured strips to be dark and not pale like they are in Mercury (refer to the image I created in the aforementioned thread.

So it would appear that I cannot start with the Tungsten theme and add the strip colours.

So I thought "Oh well, I'll have to start with the Mercury theme which does have this feature and do a hell of a lot more editing to get the darker UI I need". Well that idea isn't going to happen either.

What I immediately discovered is that as soon as you make any change to the original Mercury theme however small, the resulting theme removes strip colours. WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!   WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN???
 

Please chip in this time Cakewalk and tell me I'm wrong and am missing something.
 
 
 
 
 

Here is the mockup I made
 
 

yes, without this it makes little sense to move away from original theme,
in dark theme ProChannel has no color indication of track selected which irritates me most

I miss colored strips as well but I don't believe it is anything to complain about.
as far as cakewalk giving you a new editor to make your own themes.
think about it, if cakewalk never gave you the tungsten theme, you wouldn't be upset.
so just use Mercury, that's what I do. I still find mercury to be very efficient in what im really trying to accomplish, and that's create music.
I do love the dark theme and  if you choose "Large Icons" in the strips in CV + TV it does make a big difference.
Here's to hoping they bring back colored strips in Dark theme. but if they don't, I wont loose a bolt over it. 

When/if they do bring it back (I'd bet on the former), it's already possible to make darker strips when using the original, unmodified Mercury theme so it would be possible to make darker strips in other themes as long as the strip colorization option exists.
 
As to no response from Cakewalk, they're not going to respond unless they have something definite. I do know they are aware that it's important to users to be able to do colored strips. However, apparently it's not as simple to implement as it might seem. I suspect like many of the features, there will be updates to the Theme Editor that reflect community sentiment (consider how many improvements were made to Mix Recall since its inception).

chuckebaby
if cakewalk never gave you the tungsten theme, you wouldn't be upset.

I've actually been asking for this for more than 7 years and no Cakewalker has ever replied.
 
If some clever bod who does reply to these things can tell me, is there some kind of highly secret code inside of Mercury that colourises the strips, some highly secret code that is missing from Tungsten and gets stripped out when you save a modified version of Mercury? How do I find that code and re-apply it to my modified theme?

Hi Craig
 
You can't darken the coloured strips in Mercury in any usable way.
If I chose Black as my track colour then I can get a dark grey strip. However, now I have black wave forms on dark grey clip background. As you cannot change the default clip background colours from dark grey that would make the clips pane unusable. Changing clip colours can only be done after the fact. Completely unsatisfactory. I've been banging on about this issue for years too and still no joy. Can't think why we still can't have clip backgrounds respond to track colour.

If you change and save any theme, even while using Mercury as a template, you lose the ability to color entire strips. Why? I don't know. Being able to change VU Tick Marks and folder colors are also messed up at this point. I would just use the theme editor to fix the VU TM, but just changing that one things and saving strips the color from other elements. Looks like it's going to take some time to work out the bugs. After all this, I'm back to using Mercury. It works. Maybe I'll give it all a shot again later.

Hi Reso...
 
I agree. I really do hope this is a bug and not deliberate.

zoffmeister
Hi Reso...
 
I agree. I really do hope this is a bug and not deliberate.

My guess is that it's 'deliberate' in the sense that they knew it would be a limitation of themes, but that it was a non-trivial feature to implement, and they didn't want it to hold up the initial release of support for themes and the theme editor.
 
I have to think this capability is high on the development To-Do list.