Introduction to Doggiebox

Welcome! Doggiebox is a versatile percussion sequencer for Mac OS X. With Doggiebox you will be able to create and manipulate drum tracks in minutes, ranging from the realism of a human drummer on a full kit to the imaginitively bizarre.

Doggiebox has been designed with home-recording musicians and hobbyists in mind, to complement a human drummer for a variety of situations. Whether you want to quickly produce a demo without taking the time to set up and record real drums, or have grand aspirations but don't own a drum kit, or just need a click track for guitar, Doggiebox is the perfect tool to fill the gap!

We believe that the Mac should remain the platform of choice for recording and post-production among computer-using musicians. Other beat-box and accompaniment software exists for the Mac, but none had proven good enough to satisfy the needs of our principal developer (himself a musician). And so Doggiebox was conceived.

Overview of features

Here's a sampling of some of the things you can do with Doggiebox today:

• create and modify drum tracks of unlimited length and easily edit intricate rhythms using a flexible yet intuitive interface
• define, arrange and re-use song sections (such as verses and choruses) by dragging and dropping in a scrolling list, for efficient song building
• specify tempo and time signature changes, including compound time, over arbitrary bars in a song
• create and use your own drum kits, including their actual sounds and icons, and change between different drum kits while working on a song
• play songs through the speakers, to any MIDI-capable device or application, or export them to any of a dozen formats for use in other audio applications like GarageBand or ProTools

Stay up to date

You may wish to bookmark the Doggiebox web site and check back periodically for news and updates, especially during the development cycle.

Even better, we strongly encourage you to join the Doggiebox mailing list. This discussion list is open to everyone, and is the de facto place for discussing Doggiebox issues, tips and tricks, posting bug reports and enquiries, and connecting with other users. New releases will also be announced there first.

Why to buy Doggiebox

Before you purchase a licence, Doggiebox will operate but some functionality will be limited. In particular, songs will be restricted to a maximum duration of 30 seconds, and exported audio files will be watermarked with a voice print. These limitations allow you to fully evaluate Doggiebox and its capabilities before deciding to register. But we urge you to; it's worth it! ;-)

Upon purchasing you will be sent a personal registration code which will unlock full functionality. Licensed users will also get special access to beta and development builds of upcoming versions, priority technical support, and access to other forthcoming features. Furthermore, you will be supporting an up-and-coming Mac software house that hopes to bring you many more quality software offerings in the future. Order online quickly and easily!

General concepts

To take full advantage of Doggiebox it's not mandatory to have any particular musical training, although there are many areas where a general background in music theory will prove useful.

Some terms that share similar meaning are often used interchangeably. For the sake of clarity, here are a few concepts used in this manual:

• A musical passage is divided into logical groupings of beats, which are usually called measures or bars. We also refer to them as patterns.
• A given beat can itself be broken into smaller discrete events in time, which we call beat subdivisions.
• Several patterns may be assigned to a section, and then manipulated more easily as a group.
• A drum kit often consists of wide range of instruments varying in size, shape and form, usually including different types of drums, cymbals, and other accessories. When we refer to a drum or an instrument, we really mean any member of a drum kit (whether it be a drum, a cymbal, or whatever).

Doggiebox treats songs and drum kits as separate (but related) entities. Each is stored in a separate type of file. Any number of songs may share the same drum kit. Drum kits themselves can be modified and expanded independently of the songs which use them.