The Bee hi-res icon sets

[hiccup]

The way application icons are rendered and displayed can vary a lot between display settings, screen resolutions, applications, the use of scaling, etc.

The current MusicBee icon file (musicbee.exe) contains a limited amount of the basic recommended icon sizes. These will work fine in most circumstances.
But when an application—or Windows scaling—needs to display an icon in a size that is not provided, it will do some resizing of an available image.
That will usually probably look fine, but it won't be pixel-perfect as intended.

Here are some MusicBee icon sets that contain pretty much all icon sizes that Windows and most applications will ever need.

I made three colour variations: the original MusicBee colouring, a green version, and a red one.











note:
I'm not using a 4k display, nor Windows scaling (125% / 150%) myself, so I would be interested if a forum member that uses one or both of these could provide feedback if it does make a noticeable difference.
I'd like to know if it's really worth the effort to create and include all these different sizes.


________________________________________________________________________________________________

updated:

There are now three sets of icons.
All icons are what I call hi-res, meaning that they contain pixel-perfect image sizes for all occurring situations, including 125% and 150% Windows scaling.


The first is a set of subtle colour variations on the original MusicBee icon.  (row 1)
The second set uses more solid colours.  (row 2)
And the third one contains outlined icons with transparency in various colours.  (row 3)




download: The Bee colour variations icon set (row 1)

download: Solid colour variations icon set (row 2)

download: Transparent colour variations icon set (row 3)


an example of Solid Red @ 256 pixels:

[psychoadept]

Thanks, I tried replacing the MusicBee.ico file in the installation on my external drive and I thought it looked better right away. Tested on a 1920x1080 screen with 100% scaling (20"), and on a 2256x1504 screen (13.5") with 150% scaling.

[hiccup]

…I tried replacing the MusicBee.ico file in the installation on my external drive and I thought it looked better right away…

Thanks for the feedback, then I guess I will add these additional sizes also to new icons I may possibly create in the future.

[hiccup]

Having played around with icons some more, I intend to create and publish a couple more colour variations on the original MusicBee icon.
For now this is what I have in mind:



This post is pretty much an ask for comments/suggestions, and an opportunity for anyone to voice specific colour wishes.
I intend to publish a final set the next weekend or so.

[avididid]

These really look great except for the very last one!  Too bright for me but other will like!  Nice Work, David N.

[hiccup]

updated

There are now three different icon sets in different variations.
See the start post.

[Mayibongwe]

Just gave these a go, they look fantastic. Thanks hiccup.

I'm guessing there's something I'm doing wrong because MusicBee is defaulting back to the original icon when the application is pinned to the taskbar.
Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening? (preferences -> general -> select icon...is how I'm applying the icons)

[hiccup]

I'm guessing there's something I'm doing wrong because MusicBee is defaulting back to the original icon when the application is pinned to the taskbar.
Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening? (preferences -> general -> select icon...is how I'm applying the icons)

I tried it myself, and this indeed isn't very easy to accomplish.
This is what I did to achieve it:

- pin the icon to the taskbar
- close MusicBee
- right-click the pinned icon
- right-click MusicBee > Properties
- under the 'Shortcut' tab select 'Change icon' and select your icon

This should do the trick, and if you right-click the pinned icon again you should see the new icon.
But, in the taskbar the original icon keeps showing.
It seems that the so-called Windows Explorer icon shell needs to be refreshed for that.

This is how I did that:
- download Nirsofts NirCmd utility and extract the nircmd.exe to an easy to navigate to location.
- open a command prompt panel (Win+R, open: cmd)
- enter the path to nircmd.exe, and add 'shellrefresh' behind it.
  (so you should have something like: D:\nircmd.exe shellrefresh)
- press enter and close the cmd panel.
That does the trick for me.

Mayibongwe found an easier solution for the 'refreshing icon library' part:
- Have a Windows Explorer panel opened.
- Right-click the taskbar > Task Manager
- Find the instance of Windows Explorer on the left, right-click it > Restart


P.S.
I updated the Transparent icons pack.
The small icons (16 & 20 px.) turned out somewhat fuzzy so I sharped them a bit.

[Mayibongwe]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

- download Nirsofts NirCmd utility and extract the nircmd.exe to an easy to navigate to location.
- open a command prompt panel (Win+R, open: cmd)
- enter the path to nircmd.exe, and add 'shellrefresh' behind it.
  (so you should have something like: D:\nircmd.exe shellrefresh)
- press enter and close the cmd panel.

Restarting "Windows Explorer" in the task manager also proved to do the same job on this part.

[hiccup]

Restarting "Windows Explorer" in the task manager also proved to do the same job on this part.

Hmm, the mysterious ways of Windows…
A complete restart of the computer doesn't refresh it, but indeed restarting Explorer does.

[hiccup]

updated

I noticed that some legacy software had issues displaying some of the icon sizes.
It seems related to the icons having been created using some sort of png compression.
So I recreated the icons with png compression turned off (resulting in slightly larger icon file sizes) which solved this (probably rare) issue.

[sn0uts]

Bitly is blocking the shortlink for the Transparent set for some reason. The other two are fine.

[hiccup]

Bitly is blocking the shortlink for the Transparent set for some reason. The other two are fine.

Thanks for reporting, sn0uts.
Bitly is falsely blocking several links to my contributions, amongst them this one.

If you want to be of help in solving the issue, you could fill in the 'false blocking' form that Bitly's blocking page has a link to.
(and I would appreciate other forum members doing the same, even if they have no interest in this particular download)

Contrary to what that page suggests, you don't need to enter a google account. Only an email address, which doesn't need to be a functional one.
(Unless you are interested in possible feedback from them. But until know Bitly has been deaf, dumb and blind to reports)