if you want to adjust skins that use the default musicbee layout check out the skinning guide by RotemK in the "how to section" on this forum - that doesnt require the skin creator and can be done using any text editor.
If you want to change the layout and have your own controls for the main player panel using bitmap images, then you would need the skin creator
for the skin creator:
put this in a separate directory from MB
http://www.mediafire.com/?zvj3jwe248k4qf9the program will load a file: skin.xml (included with zip) and render it according to the layout and referenced bitmaps. The example skin references Dark.xml for the colours for the following elements
Player.DisplayPanel
Player.Control.Default
Player.Control.Disabled
Player.Control.Highlight
Player.StarRating.Default
Player.StarRating.Lowlight
Player.SpectrumDefault
Player.SpectrumDead
Player.SpectrumLow
Player.SpectrumMedium
Player.SpectrumHigh
a couple of things need setting in skin.xml:
1. you need to reference a colour skin in the root node (and it needs to be in the same folder as skin.xml) eg.
<root sourceSkin="Dark">
2. a new property for the ProgressBar element - when playing web files/ podcasts and the file is buffering, MB displays a buffering graphic. This new attribute tells MB the area the graphic can be displayed - in this example, the top 4/bottom 2 pixels wont be drawn in
<element id="ProgressBar" parent="TrackInfoPanel">
..
<bufferingMargin top="4" bottom="2" left="1" right="1" />
..
</element>
when ready, you need to use the Save button to create a compiled skin (make sure you save the compiled skin to the musicbee Skins folder).
I've created an example in the zip to show what can be done.
WARNING: at this point its easy to crash the program if you do something thats invalid eg. set the layout of an element such that the width is zero, or reference a bitmap that doesnt exist. It copies the last loaded skin to skin.bak, so just rename skin.bak to skin.xml if you run into problems or contact me to resolve