download the file from http://www.dickmacinnis.com/ardourbluemod.tar.gz
This is the Light Blue mod for Ardour/GTK/QT. If you install all these files, your applications will have a pleasing (in my opinion) look which will be uniform throughout your system (including Ardour, firefox, qjackctl, etc.). Thanks to Paul for his excellent software, and Thorwil for his great logo and fader designs.
Here’s a couple screenshots:
Editor - http://www.dickmacinnis.com/editor.png
Mixer - http://www.dickmacinnis.com/mixer.png
Matching Firefox and Qjackctl - http://www.dickmacinnis.com/maindesktop.png
The colors chosen were picked based on:
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Ardour’s Light UI - I prefer the light scheme when using the same theme across the system, as browsing, document editing, etc. can get really tiring with dark color schemes
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The Ardour website - I like the use of blue in the site, it sets ardour apart from other DAWs and their logos, which is why I’ve included a hue adjusted splash screen (more blue, less cyan/green) and blue icons (instead of red, which only seems to appear in the icons due to thorwil’s original design as far as I can tell - BTW, I always liked the ardour icons in red, but it seems that Paul prefers blue in his first impression, so why not keep it consistent
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A general average of modern system colors installed by default, including KDE4’s Oxygen, Clearlooks default, Debian’s design, Fedora’s overall appearance, etc… (Most systems default to a bluish look nowadays)
(I also changed the fader designs to reflect the un-purple nature of the new theme and to increase the contrast)
The first file you’ll probably want to install is “ardour2_ui_light.rc”. On a stock ubuntu system (and possibly others), if you’ve installed via your package manager (or a .deb file), you’ll need to replace the file of the same name in /etc/ardour2 with the one in this archive. If you’ve compiled from source, this file needs to go in /usr/local/etc/ardour2 (or wherever you installed ardour when you compiled it). Note that this replaces the light theme that comes with ardour currently, so back up your existing file if you want to switch back. Because of the design of Ardour’s theme switcher, we only get two options.
To install the modified icons, faders and splashscreen, copy the files from the “ardour2” folder into either /usr/share/ardour2, /usr/local/share/ardour2, or wherever you’ve installed Ardour. Make sure not to overwrite the whole directory (or the icons subdirectory) if there is no “merge” option in your file manager though. Nautilus, Dolphin, and Konqueror all have this option when overwriting directories, but I can’t speak for others (you may have to dive in and do it manually)
The next thing is to install the gtk theme. Make sure you have the clearlooks engine installed, and simply install the theme as you would any other (ArdourLightBlue.tar.gz is the file you want). I’m not going to go over too much detail on this one, as it’s heavily documented elsewhere. (also note that in the screenshots, I’m using the UbuntuStudio window decorations, which can also be found elsewhere).
If you’re using qt4 at all, you should grab qgtkstyle (google it) and use gtk+ for your kde apps (you’ll probably also want to install qtconfig if you’re using a gnome-centric system like ubuntu)
The last mod I’ve included here is qtrc, which you should place in your .qt folder in your home directory. This one isn’t perfect, but it makes qt3 apps (like qjackctl, muse, etc…) look alot closer to the gtk theme
P.S. as always, check out dickmacinnis.com