- Doggiebox - lists.zygoat.ca

Doggiebox Review
by Corey Knafelz 17 Aug '05

17 Aug '05

Just ran across this randomly... "Zygoat's Doggiebox is an awesome little app that satisfies your need to create your own drum sequences. Matt Willmore takes an in-depth look at what Doggiebox has to offer." http://maczealots.com/reviews/doggiebox/

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Latest Beta
by Stephen Witte 17 Aug '05

17 Aug '05

Can someone please send me a link to the latest beta version. Thanks for the help, Steve

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70sLudwigKitXXX
by David Holloway 09 Aug '05

09 Aug '05

hi folks, i have finally found some time to assemble the third in the 70sLudwigKit series. this definitely sucks less than the vII kit. of course, no one drum sound fits all tastes so your mileage may vary. the compressed zip file is ~20MB and the uncompressed kit is a whopping 100+MB. there's 80 or so individual sounds. i made new icons, with screwy combinations of iconography and color to make things a bit more readable (at least to me). the sad news is that this is the last in the line... i sold the kit. enjoy! and let me know what you think. a test arrangement is included. sort of a sped-up tweaked-out bo diddley kinda thing. here's the link: http://www.slugworth.com/ludwig/ (ben feel free to cross-post on www.doggiebox.com if you like). cheers, david. ps: to hear me playing live on "the cutouts" recent ep check out the main page: http://www.slugworth.com/ pps: be gentle. ;-) these are our first recordings, tracked, mixed, and burned to cd in less than 12 hours (on borrowed studio time).

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Window help again
by Mike Listrom 23 Jul '05

23 Jul '05

> >> Is there any way to have control over the sizes of the drum kit >> window, the sections window and the playlist window? I find on longer >> songs or large drum kits I cannot see as much as I would like. >> > > Have you tried dragging the split-view bar which lies immediately > above > the transport controls? You should see a little indentation, midway > across. Click near there and drag. By doing this and resizing the > window, you will be able to make the sections and playlist tables as > large as you want. The drum kit list won't get any wider > currently, but > you can at least make it indefinitely taller. > > Thank you for pointing this out. Is there any way to control width? >> Also the header columns in the sections area are easily disturbed by >> user input, such as dragging a header, which will cause undesirable >> effects. >> > > Can you elaborate on this? What kind of "undesirable effects" do > you get? > > -ben > I accidently clicked and dragged on the column header. I was able to achieve this as well. I don't think I can reset things from here.

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Build 1E11 with lots of little fixes
by Ben Kennedy 22 Jul '05

22 Jul '05

Hi all, After being sidetracked earlier this month with music festivals and other things, as well as taking awhile to get Tiger up and running on my dev machine and everything building again properly, a new beta is finally ready! <http://www.doggiebox.com/distribution/Doggiebox-1E11.tbz> includes the following changes and improvements: ? Fixed a couple of long-standing bugs related to changing drum kits: previously, the pattern editor would not be visually refreshed with the new kit icons, and the previous kit's keyboard shortcuts would illogically remain in force. These are now fixed (thanks Chris). ? Fixed a bug with drum keyboard shorcuts where two variants of the same drum type but with different shortcuts could not be selected immediately one after another (thanks Chris and Dan). ? Fixed a bug where tempo markings were sometimes not behaving properly when trying to set or modify them via the inspector (thanks Charlie). ? Fixed a bug where the assigned tempo would sometimes drift when repeatedly inserting new bars, if the bars were in a compound time signature (thanks Håkon). ? Added a method by which to override the default beat denomination in which the tempo is specified, as was possible in earlier versions of Doggiebox. To change the tempo basis for the selected bar(s), right- click on the note icon next to the bpm field in the inspector and choose a new note value from the pop-up menu. ? Fixed a bug where extra bars (or the entire song) could become spuriously selected while making a selection with the mouse (thanks Mike). ? New sections are now created containing a new empty bar, rather than nothing as before (thanks Charlie). ? Numeric values for MIDI properties (channel, note, velocity) in the drum kit editor are now directly editable (thanks Carl). ? Rebuilt under Tiger 10.4.2; minimum required system is Panther 10.3.9. Next up, I hope to work on fixing the copy and paste mess with respect to bars, beats and song structure. -ben -- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca

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Window help.
by Mike Listrom 21 Jul '05

21 Jul '05

Hello, I am a fellow who likes to push the limits of d. I am saying this so you can have bias if you were to make my comments into a persona or something like that. Is there any way to have control over the sizes of the drum kit window, the sections window and the playlist window? I find on longer songs or large drum kits I cannot see as much as I would like. Also the header columns in the sections area are easily disturbed by user input, such as dragging a header, which will cause undesirable effects. The column header dragging functionality would be more useful I feel if it was a re-sizable window, with space for longer notes and such. Perhaps its just an unnecessary feature. Regards, mike listrom

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MIDI Interaction with Roland SPD-S
by Chris Wicklas 21 Jul '05

21 Jul '05

Hi Everybody, I have read through past posts and haven¹t been able to find an answer to my question. I¹m curious to know if there is a way for me have a Roland SPD-S control the start/stop of patterns in DB. I am just a beginner when it comes to MIDI, so forgive me if this is a simple question. Let me explain. I am using DB as a click to play along with live. I created sections for each of my band¹s songs. Each section consists of a 1 bar phrase that loops with the song¹s tempo... In essence, a database of songs and tempos. When we play live, I create a playlist to mirror our set list of the songs from the sections list. I can then easily start/stop the click for each song by hitting the space bar on my Powerbook and then the down arrow to move on to the next song. This works pretty well, but it would work even better if I could figure out a way to control the start/stop, or maybe even the moving on to the next pattern from the Roland via a foot switch or extra pad. Is this possible? Or is there a way to connect a foot switch directly to the Powerbook which would do the same thing? The Roland is currently connected to a 1ghz Titanium Powerbook via a USB to MIDI controller. I can succussfully use the Roland to record drum parts in GarageBand, so I know the connection works. I haven¹t tried it in DB yet. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Chris -- "If you can't hear me, it's because I'm in parentheses." - Steven Wright Visit me on the web -- http://www.thedrummist.com

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Some beta observations
by Michael Carlyle 21 Jul '05

21 Jul '05

I've been writing and recording again, which means my DB activity has spiked a little bit. As a result, I've noticed a few things that I may have missed before. I may have missed a discussion about these things, or they may have been changed already. Not sure. The following are observations and are, by no means critique of the app. 1) I notice that the inspector is now the only way to insert bars. There is no longer the ability to insert multiple bars. If I want to add 16 bars, I have to click "insert bar" 16 times. Why would I want to insert 16 blank bars?... see below... 2) Copied bars do not want to paste into new sections. In order to paste copied bars, I first have to provide the correct number of blank bars to paste into. Since I can't add multiples in a single operation (see above) it is an awkward GUI point. 3) When making a selection that reaches to the end of the section, DB has a tendency to want to "wrap around" to the top. This is frustrating, since great care must be taken to end your selection at precisely the right point. I think DB should know that I've reached the end of the bar and should stop selecting no matter how far I continue to move my mouse. I got a lot done this weekend. I hope to share another song with you all fairly soon. ----------------------------------- Mike Carlyle Wilbraham, Massachusetts USA

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Re: Carl's tempo idea
by Sterling Beckwith 17 Jul '05

17 Jul '05

> IMO, it would be cool to assign tempo at the level of the playlist, > rather than the individual section. That way you could use the same > pattern in two places within a given playlist, but assign different > tempos to them. But what happens if your pattern itself includes several tempo changes? It seems the only way would be to attach to each item in the playlist a "reference pulse multiplier factor", defaulting at 1.00, which could then be tweaked and used to speed up or slow down ALL the tempi in that pattern ONLY, on playback ONLY. Tampering with the constant reference pulse could be risky, even so. Would its usefulness outweigh the well-known dangers of adding yet another "cool feature", I wonder?? -Sterling

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Follow up from Mike
by Mike Listrom 13 Jul '05

13 Jul '05

About the a-synchronous thing I was talking about: I know that doggiebox does this very well. My idea would not be beneficial.

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Listrom's suggested improvements
by Sterling Beckwith 13 Jul '05

13 Jul '05

> I would like the ability to keep a pattern playing whilst modifying > the drum pattern, or another section real-time, and then having those > changes effect the current audio at the user's will. It seems this > would entail improvements to the sections/playlist functionality. Sounds like fun, but would it be worth the effort? "At the user's will" does, I think, give away what the problem would be: SOMEONE does indeed have to decide! The trick would be for the system to know reliably which version to play at any given moment, while changes were being made on the fly. Personally, I think a composing-oriented system should NOT be so fluid. Better to be sure that what is played will be just what you specified; then (after saving that version) make your changes, audition those specific changes as often as you need to, and only then register further changes if desired. A composer has to learn eventually how things will sound BEFORE hearing them played. Adjusting to ongoing changes while playing in real time seems to require too much smarts on the part of the system, not enough from the composer. > The only window that I could see being a floater is > the transport. A major advantage of floating windows is that they release maximum screen real estate for the composition itself. A stable interface with everything in easy reach is always nice to have. But the more you box in the notation grid with other permanent fixtures, the less room there is likely to be to view the part of the composition you are currently working on. So here as elsewhere, there's tradeoffs to be made...

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Some other changes.
by Mike Listrom 12 Jul '05

12 Jul '05

Along with the a-synchronous topic that was brought up by Charlie, I would like the ability to keep a pattern playing wilst modifying the drum pattern, or another section real-time, and then having those changes effect the current audio at the user's will. It seems this would entail improvements to the sections/playlist functionality. I would also like to see the pallets and various functionality encapsulated in collapsable windows such as Omni Group's omniGraffle. Otherwise, the velocity controls should be incorporated into the single window. The only window that I could see being a floater is the transport.

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red squares
by Biff America 12 Jul '05

12 Jul '05

Greetings. I am new to doggiebox. Can anyone tell me what the deal is with the red squares? I downloaded some of the sample files and some of the squares in the pattern editor are filled with a light red color instead of an instrument icon. I am assuming that these notes have less velocity or something, but I don't know. How are they created? What are they? Any help would be appreciated.

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RE: [Doggiebox] Some beta observations
by Tor Lillegraven 05 Jul '05

05 Jul '05

and I thought I was just being a grumpy old dog, prefering to stick with my old habits. Thanks for speaking out about these issues Michael -- I totally agree with your observations. These 3 points that you mention have annoyed me to the point that I have reverted to an earlier build of DB. I do a lot of rearranging within songs, and the new copy/paste/insert new bar functionality, well... its a bitch! ;) Tor >>> Michael Carlyle <mcarlyle(a)charter.net> 05.07.05 0:42 >>> I've been writing and recording again, which means my DB activity has spiked a little bit. As a result, I've noticed a few things that I may have missed before. I may have missed a discussion about these things, or they may have been changed already. Not sure. The following are observations and are, by no means critique of the app. 1) I notice that the inspector is now the only way to insert bars. There is no longer the ability to insert multiple bars. If I want to add 16 bars, I have to click "insert bar" 16 times. Why would I want to insert 16 blank bars?... see below... 2) Copied bars do not want to paste into new sections. In order to paste copied bars, I first have to provide the correct number of blank bars to paste into. Since I can't add multiples in a single operation (see above) it is an awkward GUI point. 3) When making a selection that reaches to the end of the section, DB has a tendency to want to "wrap around" to the top. This is frustrating, since great care must be taken to end your selection at precisely the right point. I think DB should know that I've reached the end of the bar and should stop selecting no matter how far I continue to move my mouse. I got a lot done this weekend. I hope to share another song with you all fairly soon. ***************************************************************** Denne fotnoten bekrefter at denne e-postmeldingen ble skannet av MailSweeper og funnet fri for virus. ***************************************************************** This footnote confirms that this email message has been swept by MailSweeper for the presence of computer viruses. *****************************************************************

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OFFish: Flowchart (Slight Return)
by Sion Morris 26 Jun '05

26 Jun '05

Yes Flowchart is a favourite of mine too. Great bass sound too - rrrreally chunky - early McCartney style and cool wah wah sound to the solo too. did i mention great lyrics. Mikes other stuff is pretty good and getting better too by my reckoning - Flowchart is the best to date and is on my sub-ipod mp3 player. Sion Morris Liverpool www.cinnamondesign.co.uk/music/music.html ------------------------------------------- > Heh, whilst letting the ol' iPod randomize its way through the day, > MC's "Flowchart" chart, with its Doggiebox drums (LudwigII kit, > no?), popped up. Until I remembered it was done by Mike, I didn't > pick up anything to tell me "homemade", nor "drum machine" for that > matter. Passes the casual listening test :) > > Cheers, > Carl > > -- > Carl Edlund Anderson > mailto:cea@carlaz.com > http://www.carlaz.com/ > > > > > From: Thorsten Kummer <thorsten.kummer(a)gmx.de> > Date: 24 June 2005 8:02:15 am BDT > To: Doggiebox List <doggiebox(a)lists.zygoat.ca> > Subject: Re: [Doggiebox] OFFish: Flowchart (Slight Return) > > > Hi, > > that's exactly what came to my mind when I first heard "Flowchart". > Sounds perfect to me. Even better than "come alive". > I think it has something to do with the drum set that he used, I > love the boomy stuff from the Ludwig kit. > > Regards > Thorsten >

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OFFish: Flowchart (Slight Return)
by Carl Edlund Anderson 24 Jun '05

24 Jun '05

Heh, whilst letting the ol' iPod randomize its way through the day, MC's "Flowchart" chart, with its Doggiebox drums (LudwigII kit, no?), popped up. Until I remembered it was done by Mike, I didn't pick up anything to tell me "homemade", nor "drum machine" for that matter. Passes the casual listening test :) Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@carlaz.com http://www.carlaz.com/

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apply to section- beta observation
by Mike Carlyle 21 Jun '05

21 Jun '05

Sometimes I want to change the tempo of a song section. In order to do this, I have to shift-click to select the first and last measure of that section. It can be frustrating for longer sections. How feasible would it be to include a checkbox in the song inspector that would allow you to apply tempo changes to entire sections? Do sections exist as units that can be modified within the underpinnings of Doggiebox? ____________ Mike Carlyle Wilbraham, MA USA

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ns_kit7 news
by Carl Edlund Anderson 16 Jun '05

16 Jun '05

For those out there in DBland who've enjoyed messing around with ns_kit7free, the full version is on the verge of release. I was reading through the PDF manual that's linked from <http://www.naturalstudio.co.uk/ns_kit7.html> and the stupid level of detail in the sample collection is ... stupid! :) There are, for example, some 4200 hi-hat samples and even the damn cowbell gets 250+. But the sampling insanity only becomes _truly_ apparent when one reads about options for kick drums with or without pre-strike pedal noise or separate samples of brushes or sticks moving through the air ahead of a drum strike. Woah .... Clearly, 4200 samples of anything (let alone the hi-hat!) is really a level detail for the e-drummers out there and completely and utterly unusable in Doggiebox (until perhaps, like, DB v10 is released in 2014 :) On the other hand, the ns_kit7 samples list at only GBP 50, with 20% off on pre-orders before it ships in a week or two, and as sample packs go that seems to me a pretty decent price for what you get (and the samples will be useful pretty much forever). I plan on shuffling through the samples to put myself together a couple of dbkits with different characteristics (ns_kit7 is primed for use with the Halion sampler, and there are a few premade kits for that set up that I can use as guide for dbkits). Any dbkit would clearly use a very small subset of samples, but I should be able to put together kits that sound different but that were recorded in a very consistent ways. At any rate, I think the sample collection will be fun tool in the box! Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@carlaz.com http://www.carlaz.com/

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Re: keyboard shortcuts
by Dan Costello 15 Jun '05

15 Jun '05

Hey Ben-- Remember we were talking about keyboard shortcuts a while back. I do actually have a reason for wanting a particular setup, and I'm curious if others would find this useful as well. Right now, with DB's current programming, the best way (imho) to set up the keyboard shortcuts is to have ALL of the same "drum type" under one key, and just cycle through them by hitting that same key multiple times until you get the one you want. This works great for many reasons, one being the limited number of keys you need to remember to be able to access every drum in the kit. The drawback(s) to that, though: you can't "play" that same drum more than once with the key-- because the next time you hit it, it cycles to the next variant. And unless you give each drum its own distinct "drum type" name, you can't play one drum type on one key and then its variant on another key in succession. (Remember the example I gave, in vol. 20, #5 of the digest.) AND if you have a lot of variants for that one drum and you go past it, you have to cycle all the way through all the other variants to get back around to it. AND you can't go straight back to a variant after choosing a different drum type-- the next time you hit that key for that drum, it goes to the default variant, or the top one in the list if no default has been chosen. I've found that actually "playing" the kit from the keyboard is not only fun, but useful. Sometimes my fingers stumble across a groove that I otherwise wouldn't have written (just like on any instrument-- writing FOR it and writing ON it are often very different processes). Then I just try to write down what I played. And, if I have someone else in the room looking for a particular beat, rather than having to write out the beat and hit play every time I adjust it, before I actually write any of it down I can "play" the beat for them live, by using the keyboard shortcuts. Maybe I'm just being silly about it, but I like the ability to play my Mac keyboard as a drum machine, and I think it broadens DB's usefulness to have that ability. It seems like it would be possible to change the KB shortcut assignments section of the code to accommodate this... any chance you could put this on the wish list? Thanks, Dan

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1E10, come 'n get 'er
by Ben Kennedy 15 Jun '05

15 Jun '05

Hey folkses, A new build is now up at <http://www.doggiebox.com/distribution/ Doggiebox-1E10.tbz>. Improvements this time around: - You may now insert more than one bar at a time by option-clicking the "Insert Bar" button in the inspector, or hitting cmd-option-shift-I. A field will reveal in the inspector palette prompting for the number of bars. - New slider in the Inspector panel for choosing the default velocity of new drums added to the pattern editor (requested by Sage). - Improved behaviour with Paste; also, new Paste Over command. - Discontiguous beat selection (temporarily disabled in last build) is now working again. There are a number of bugs which I have acknowledged but not yet fixed (e.g. several that Håkon pointed out regarding weird tempo problems when inserting multiple 6|8 bars and so on). I will investigate these soon. Also, the fine folks at MacZealots posted last weekend a wonderful Doggiebox review (based on the last beta). Check it out at <http:// maczealots.com/reviews/doggiebox/>. -ben -- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca

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Velocity adjustment in main window?
by Sage 15 Jun '05

15 Jun '05

The new velocity adjustment is fantastic. Two questions: 1. Will this actually affect velocity of midi notes when exporting to midi? 2. Would it be possible to place a velocity adjustment bar on the main window (perhaps near the master volume bar) to control velocity of new notes entered into the grid?

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doggie as the slave
by lori wachter 15 Jun '05

15 Jun '05

hi there, is it possibleto slave doggiebox with garageband. i guess like how idrum works? thanks

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keys question
by Christopher Evans 15 Jun '05

15 Jun '05

Hi everyone I am new to doggiebox and the list. I have a question/observation about keys for selecting drums, I want to know whether this is normal. If I open a new song, add some bars and have a drumkit selected, then change kits the keys continue to call up the sounds/symbols for the first kit, ignoring any keys for the second. If I save, close and reopen, the keys for the second kit then start to operate as they should. also if I assign different keys to variants of one drum I cannot move directly between them, for example if I assign "a" to accent on the snare and "r" to rimshot, if I chose accent I can only get the rimshot by going to another drum, then pressing r, I can't go from one to the other direct. I am using version 1E9 Chris

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Doggiebox to Garageband
by stephen cottrill 14 Jun '05

14 Jun '05

Hi All, I am a new user to Doggiebox and think its great. Just one question, I have created a pretty standard drum track ( 4/4, 110 bpm, Garageband Rock Kit ) and exported it as a midi file. I then import that file into Garageband. Viewing the imported file in the Garageband editor for Software instruments, I have noticed that after about 16 bars the notes ( represented as dashes/ triggers on a timeline) start to creep. That is they start to be a bit after the beat, this continues through the track until by the end, which is at about bar 85 the notes have shifted by nearly 1/2 a beat. Its like the whole drum track has been stretched a bit. This can be rectified but it is quite time consuming and I would prefer not to have to do it. I was wondering anyone else has struck this problem when importing a Doggiebox midi file into their chosen sequencing program. Do you think it would be related to Doggiebox, Garageband, or midi files? I am using an iMac G5, 1.8GHz, 768MB, Doggiebox 1E9, Garageband v2.0.1 Cheers Steve

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ns_kit7free+.dbkit
by Carl Edlund Anderson 12 Jun '05

12 Jun '05

I've uploaded a sort of draft version of the dbkit for the ns_kit7free samples (which can be downloaded from <http:// naturalstudio.co.uk/ns_kit7freedownload.html>). This dbkit is based on the one Mike Carlyle did a while back -- I've twiddled the structure and some of the graphics and (for what it's worth) put in links for all the ns_kit7free samples; there are probably too many samples in the dbkit to use it easily, but the idea is you can easily cut down the kit to be as small as you like. This version doesn't have MIDI velocity values entered for all the different velocity samples, but should work well enough otherwise. It also borrows some cowbell and tambourine samples from the GarageBand samples (thus the "+" in the name :) The dbkit can be downloaded from: <http://www.carlaz.com/music/ns_kit7free+.dbkit.zip> I haven't bothered to link it from any of the pages on my web site since it's not really done yet, but it is pretty useable (I think) so I thought I would stick it there for people to check out. Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/

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