Additonally, if I take the original, extract the bitmap for the narrow fader, open it in my graphics editor and resave (without changing anything), and then attach that bitmap in place of the one in the resource, now the narrow fader also has a grey box. I KNOW I'm missing something simple.

Thanks for any help

You've got the colour right. It needs to be saved as a 32bit Windows Bitmap (.BMP) file.

Any thoughts about how to do that? In PSP, for example, I can change the bit depth of the image but when I save it to bmp, it says that the format doesn't support 32 bit color. I tried a few tips I found about exporting png with transparency and then using picture/fax viewer to save that as bitmap at 32 bit, but this didn't change my results.

Sorry, cant help you with the PSP thing, I've only ever used Photoshop. Download the trial - good for 30 days I think.

Hi Blades, just in the door. you can try the photoshop trail as Alree mentioned or download "gimp", it's free and supports bmp export with a 32-bit alpha. gimp is way better than PSP in many respects. PNG-24/alpha graphics support in sonar....oh man I'd love that!

Hey guys, thanks for the info. I got it figured out. For anyone who happens across this, what I had to do (using the tools I prefer) was:

1. Get the resource out. In the case of the wide format track slider for the Inspector/Console view, it's bitmap resource 2671 (intuitive enough, right?).
2. Edit the resource, or use it as a model for size and background color for your new creation. You want to make sure to center your stuff in the box horizontally and make sure you know where the vertical middle marker needs to be. Aside from that, it seems pretty flexible. I use Xara Xtreme for this, as it's an awesome app that can so some cool vector stuff for these types of graphics really fast. Unfortunately, it doesn't save to 32 bit bmp.
2a. When I create this, I use layers - the bottom layer is the grey rectangle. The top layer is the actual item I want to see.
3. Export to PSD so they layers come across.
4. Open my PSD in GIMP, go to the layers pallette and select the bottom grey box layer, choose to lock alpha transparency to this layer (don't know if you need to do this or not) and change it's opacity to 0% (fully transparent).
5. Save the image as bmp, choosing Merge, and going to the advanced options along the way and making sure to export in 32bit A8R8G8B8 mode.
6. Reintegrate the bmp that gets saved to the proper (2671 in this case) leaf under the bitmap tree.

Launch Sonar - nice...it works.

Here's my screwing around "ever so popular orange gel buttons" made faders. I have some interesting ideas here, but I will have to find the time to dig around the resources to get to the stuff I'd like to change:

glad to see you got it sorted Blades. nice start....give us more!!

I just upgraded from Sonar 3 Producer to Sonar 8 Producer and I am manually copying my color scheme (no export on 3) that I created over to 8. Nothing I seem to change in the color settings seems to change the VU Meter color on Console View. It is just staying this white color as it bounces up and down (I'm slightly color blind but I can tell most colors). I can easily change the meter color in Track View by changing the VU meter settings but it doesn't seem to change Console View. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong or what the setting is called...or am I stuck with generic?

Thanks,

ORIGINAL: Hansenhaus

Mike,

You need to open the meter properties (under options) and uncheck segmented meters in the console view. Then the meters will match the track view meters.

Hope that helps,

Eric

This did it for me.

Mike

What do I need to create color schemes?