Thanks for the kind words! My face lit up yesterday when I got the notification from PayPal, so thank you

Honestly that would be amazing, but unfortunately I'm not sure a lot of people (a lot is around 8-10) would sign up for it. I don't have social media to promote it or friends who do music to tell others about my skins. Besides, most of the people would probably download all the skins for one month for 5$ and cancel immediately, which with the waves skin bundle would really suck (because of how much time it took to create several skins).

I really hope I'm wrong, and if everything worked out with Patreon, it would be amazing.
I will definitely create Patreon as an another option though!

Edit: looked up azzimov...just wow. Much more talented than me! I'm more of a UI 2D designer, while he's very talented in 3D modelling. Just wow. Aspire to be as great one day! Hopefully I can also reach Softube levels of design too.

 

Last edited: Nov 18, 2023

Ok I'm not sure about the PurpleAudio MC77 (I don't have that one), but I could see you're also trying with brainworx stuff (bx_opto). I don't have the opto either, but so far I could extract from all brainworx stuff I tried with, using ResourceHacker.
When I got time I might install the demo, but I think it should work for you anyway, too. Try running ResourceHacker as Admin (if you haven't yet) and don't use dragn'drop, that's not working here either. Use File > Open ... to open the .dll. That's a bit cumbersome, but it's actually making a difference (at least here on my end).
And don't get fooled when ResourceHacker shows only a grey surface, you still can extract the original .png even if you don't really see it in RH. I'll show and attach an example of the bx_townhouse compressor.



As you can see RH only shows grey, but when extracting it spits out the original .png (attached)

It's not working for all PA plugins, UnfilteredAudio or DS Thorn for example, and I don't know about PurpleAudio. But it should at least work for the brainworx stuff, it's also working for ShadowHills for instance.



Let me know if you can make it work, I don't have much time at the moment but there might be other options as well.

Nice work, btw

 

Wow, that's amazing! I hope I'll be able to bring my Plugin Alliance skins to Windows too, but I'll have to look more deeply into it, especially after completing the Wavepack (waves skin pack). It seems brainworx specifically don't encrypt the UI files, which is great.

 

Also, I wonder if anyone would want old Brainworx plugins redesigned? I don’t have them or use them, but I could make some skins for them with the trial versions.

 

Soundtoys users always seem to be completely in love with them, so I'm sure they'd welcome any alternate GUIs.
I don't use Soundtoys because they're iLOK-ed, plus—last time I checked—they don't work in Studio One, which Soundtoys claims is PreSonus' fault, and PreSonus blames on them. Shocking, right?

I personally like the purple GUI, even if it is a bit gaudy. I'd fully be hyped on being able to swap it out though.
And people get sour about fancy GUIs but, like it or not, at the end of it all, we're creatures that are driven by aesthetics, to whatever degree. e.g., I don't even like @No Avenger , let alone agree with him about *anything pertaining to audio production, but I dig tygers, so I gravitate towards his posts, agreeing with everything he says... because tygers.

 

I was talking about soundtoys with that in mind, they at least need to better GUI

 

the purple MC was actually a hardware clone and the others pretty much the same, adding purple looks great but...its not a purple MC but then again if you can tweak to be a hybrid thats even cooler..

 

That was close.

 

If you are on a Mac, you can do right click Show Package Contents with all the bx ones. The png files are right there in the Resources folder without having to do extra work.. The ones I have are all from 2015 or earlier though, so i'm not sure how much help that would be. Just an fyi.

 

Would be a interesting project for a graph designer to build GUI's for Airwindows plugins, since they are free and open source. And i think it would make both the designer and AW plugins more popular

 

@ 4096 .....

you might check your messages and see if i can help ya out !??

 

Sorry, I didn't see it previously!

 

Thank you, that's exactly how I made the skins ;)

 

Honestly, I wish I could do that, but creating GUIs for them would require some type of coding, which isn't something I am particularly well-versed in as of now.

 

So, meanwhile I installed trials for the bx_opto and the MC77, no problem to grab the .png resources with ResourceHacker.
I don't know why it didn't work for you, did you try again yet? Let me know if it works, if not I could possibly help.





I could post the resources but there's no sense in that, because a) you surely got them already from the Mac versions, and more importantly b) you need to do it on your system yourself anyway, because you certainly need to bring the modified files back into the .dll.
And if you're currently working on a skin pack for Waves plugins you're probably very busy with that one already.

PLEASE BE AWARE:
I really don't want to ruin the party, but somebody has to mention that you're walking on thin ice in terms of legality.
I'm far from being a lawyer or anything, and I'm not familiar enough with MacOS to judge what you're doing exactly there. But on Windows I'm pretty sure it's not very legal to modify a "plugin.dll" and sell the modified "plugin.dll" afterwards.
Please keep this mind and take care of that, try researching the legal status of what you're doing. You surely have zero interest in getting sued by Plugin Alliance or Waves.

Do you accicently know who @MikeLeone is?
(odd question probably, but I got a feeling you might know him)

 

Oh, I guess RH didn't work because I ran it off an emulation layer (wine) rather than a virtual machine. Going to try that.

About the legality...

I definitely am not going to sell any .dll files. I'll only tell people that they might do that, but the responsibility is on them.

Frankly speaking, part of the reason why I'm doing all of this is out of desperation.
I'm an 18 y/o guy who had to flee my previous country because of "some problems" (not personal, but country-wide, political. you can probably guess the country and no it's not in the middle east, which I can't mention at the risk of being found out). Money is tough. Life is tough. No programs for me as a refugee, because the rest of the world doesn't want to consider people fleeing that country refugees. I don't deserve the problems and pain I encounter due to others' actions, but that's the way world is unfortunately.

I hope that some company sees my designs and hires me. Actually, Universal Audio (Drew from the YouTube videos specifically) said that he and the dev team liked my skin for PolyMAX, but obviously that's not enough for them to just hire me.

To be honest, right now my life is in more danger than if I was getting sued. Alongside the waves skin pack I was planning to release a message, almost like a "cry for help" (which I know it's embarrassing, but I've got no other options). Maybe I'm being delusional, but I sincerely hope some company sees it and hires me. That would quite literally save my life. Besides, because of my ethnicity it would be easier for Waves to hire me due to immigration laws, so...yeah I really hope that happens.

Well, I'm sorry for the off-topic wall of text, but I had to say this. I've got nobody to share this with, so yeah...

I don't know who Mike Leone is. I to be honest don't really know anyone here, except Olymoon and PiRAT and No Avenger (everybody knows them).

P.S: if some special services are looking at this (that would be hilarious), leave me alone please lol. I've got enough on my plate.

 

Last edited: Nov 19, 2023

Ah ok, so you don't have a Windows PC and you're doing this from your Mac using Wine and/or VM?
That might explain why it wasn't working. I don't have a Mac so I'm not very familiar with the OS and I can't try this myself. Still I think it should work, at least with a Virtual Machine.
There are other tools than ResourceHacker, if it's still not working you could test something else.

That's great to hear!
I just wanted to be sure you're aware of that, and you're not blindly running into something that could possibly make your overall situation even worse in the end. So you're planning to give people the .png files and instructions how to use them, something like that?
In theory you could even ask PA or Waves for permission to publish the modified .dll files.
I only know of one similar example, and that's "Colove". They are offering skins that are made exactly like that, extracting resources from a .dll, modify them and pack them back into the .dll. For example FM8 by Native Instruments >>> https://coloverecordings.com/native-instruments-fm8-mod-v1-0-by-colove-products-windows/
But as far I know they got permission from NI to do that, and they are not selling these things, instead they give that stuff away as a bonus. Likely because i.e. NI didn't allow to sell.
By contacting them you could possibly sneak into a position where you could "officially" do alternate skins for them. On the other hand there's a risk they prohibit you to do anything regarding their skins lol. You'd need to evaluate risk/reward ratio of that.


Sorry about your bad life situation
Believe me, I'd instantly make a donation, but I'm having very tough times as well and am probably as broke as you are.

EDIT 1:
it might not be a bad idea to drop the guys from COLOVE an Email and ask them how they are/were handling those things with for example Native Instruments. Obviously they are experienced in that regard and could possibly give you some tips how to deal with this.
And I guess you could even talk to them in your native language

EDIT 2:
so far I was only talking about vst2, but ResourceHacker's even working for vst3.
Initially I was (successfully) testing other tools for vst3, because I didn't expect RH would work for that. But afterwards I quickly tested with RH and apparently it's working for vst3 as well...

 

Last edited: Nov 19, 2023

Oh, that's some hint. Since it's free I tried my luck with the WiN version of MC 77 key'd.
I could import the R2R file (the dll is just a link in this case), extract the png, edit, save and replace it but it's not working anymore. No audio app can open it.
I suppose it's because of the file size because the date didn't change but I for sure do not know enough about this matter.

 

Oh that sounds like something to do with hash (if I recall correctly that's how it's called). If there was a way to generate new hash, the plugin would probably work. Although I personally wouldn't myself do that as part of the package, because it's direct modification of the code.

 

Well that's interesting, and I actually had stuff like that in the back of my mind before.
That's one reason why I mentioned "legal status" before. It could be the case the .dll files have something like watermarks implemented, or other DRM/licensing stuff. If I recall correctly I think I spotted a "publicKeyToken" (or so, can't have a look currently), that seemed to be uncommon to me. Or it might just be the hash like @4096 mentioned. Anyway, I was afraid a resaved .dll could end up being disfunctional.

Unfortunately I'm not having much time to bother with this, I need to find spots in between other things for it. Means I haven't even tried yet to bring modified files back into the .dll.
I will try that tomorrow, all my PA stuff is legit (bx_opto and MC77 are trials), so it would already be interesting to compare if there's a difference between legit and crked, in terms of the .dll being functional again.
Would you mind sharing the .dll file you resaved, of let's say the MC77? Maybe in PM, I'd be curious if I could spot noticable differences to my legit .dll. I don't have time today anymore, but I'd check that tomorrow then. I'd also ask for the R2R .dll, but I'm not familiar with the R2R release so I'm not really sure what you mean with "the dll is just a link in this case"

So there's no "physical" .dll and they're using kind of a symlink or what? How are you able to open it with ResourceHacker then lol, I really don't get it without knowing it