Yeah I've been ranting about this over at the Ableton M4L forum. There's no way to change this behavior.

It's unfortunate too because the new default M4L object colors are really hard for me to see over the default M4L background color.

I asked over there if there were some kind of hack: a .json file or something inside the Live package that one could tweak to at least get some different defaults that are readable.

Any C74 folks have an answer to this?

stringtapper,

I did find your thread over there, agree completely, and I was going to chime in, but I thought I'd wait & see if I can get some sort of official feedback here first. I find the lack of any explanation/answer to your question a little troubling. What I can tell you is that the m4l default colors are locked to the Live theme. While I can see perhaps some logic in tying the colors of the actual m4l device itself in the track to the Live theme, I'm at a total loss to understand why the ability to set my own default colors in an open m4l patcher seems to have been neutered, even though the Object Defaults inspector is still accessible and works for "new patchers", etc.

Like I said, I'm really hoping I'm wrong... Losing the ability to tailor one's workspace to one's tastes is an enormous step backwards, especially given how much this feature way hyped when it was introduced in Max 5.xx. It's an accessibility issue for me, since my eyesight is failing faster than the US healthcare system (before anybody gets their feathers ruffled, I'm an American, so I can joke about that...even though it really ain't funny...)

I'll bet this was an Ableton decision, along the lines of the new totalitarian browser... You WILL use these colors and you WILL like them! :-) :-) :-)

If they can't give us a way to set the defaults then I hope they would at least change the defaults of some of the Live skins. The new object colors work ok with the darker background of the newer M4L devices like the convolution reverb, but M4L devices don't default with that background color and instead have the original M4L grey, which I like, but combined with the new object default colors is pretty unreadable, for me at least.

I just wasted half my day with this same problem. I really don't understand why the colors are locked down like this. This is certainly a bug that needs to be fixed. In your M4L window if you select File->New Patcher you can apply themes but the don't carry over if you use them as a bpatcher. Would be nice if cycling could iron some of these things out. I would like to spend my time making music and not figuring out how a feature is crippled in one workspace and not another.

Yeah it's annoying. :-/

I can see why those in charge have done this, but maybe it would be nice if when the user selected "set object to default values", that the actual defaults would override Live's global color scheme.

Another suggestion would be for a similar, but global option to be a preference in a m4l preference panel (In Live).