On 16,02,03 at 2:13 am -0500, Justin M. wrote:

I haven't been able to use the new build yet because of the package problem...which is odd, since I'm set up as the admin and haven't had the problem before...but here are just a few questions/comments from a guitarist using doggiebox with a home studio.

Hi Justin, Thanks for the great feedback and ideas, and my apologies for not replying to you sooner. First off, I hope you've been able to download version 1.0.1 -- I've done away with the installer package, it's just a plain Stuffit file now so hopefully all will be well again. Here are some (brief) remarks on your remarks:

1) I think someone else might have mentioned individual volume controls for each drum, but I'd like to expand a little on that, since I'm not sure exactly what they had in mind. I'd like to see the controls set in the score itself, and what would be even handier is a crescendo feature of some sort so that I could do something like have a snare or kick beat grow louder to lead into a chorus. If that makes sense...I'm obviously not as up on some of the technical aspects, and I suspect a lot of people like me would like a feature like that rather than setting an individual volume on each drumbeat, which is the only other way I could think of to do it.

Yeah, cool idea, and I have a few ideas up my sleeve for this (adding crescendos and whatnot over bars). Work on dynamics controls will be one of the next focus areas for improvement. It will be cool to have your feedback when the time comes to develop the user interface for it.

2) When I'm adding bars, the bars always come in at the beginning...it's not too much of a problem now that I plan for it, but I pretty much just sit down with a short sketch of the song on headphones and map out how I want to do the drums, and since I'm never sure of how many bars the song actually has, it becomes a bit of a problem when I realize I'm short.

Ok, I don't follow you here. You can add bars wherever you want in the song; just place the insertion point (flashing red vertical bar) where you want them to -- either use the cursor keys or the mouse (click in between bars in the header area).

I also had some trouble copying and pasting measures...I can't remember if it took out the entire bar or how it worked when I tried (I pretty much just gave up, I have a short a attention span), but it would be great if there were separate features to copy and paste both the bar itself or just the contents of the bar into another bar...again, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I think I see what you mean... well, if you want to completely replace bar A with bar B, all you have to do is delete bar A and then paste bar B. I forget what the current behaviour is when you have a bar selected, and you hit Paste; my intention is for it to work like a text editor, i.e. the selection would be replaced. I'll check this out and fix it if need be.

3) Have you thought about adding stereo functionality to individual drum lines? It might be there and I'm missing it...I haven't had a chance to play with the program as much as I'd like. But it would be nice to be able to pan a drum into the left or right channel instead of having everything centered.

You can do so on a per-drum basis; open the drum kit file (e.g. "bens drums.dbkit"), and adjust the panning control for the instrument you want to pan. It's not now possible to change panning on the fly (in the middle of a piece), but you can adjust the paramaters of the drum kit as you desire.

I've found some ways to deal with that in mixing, but I've recently regressed from using ProTools to using my trusty Tascam (I don't know why, I just prefer analog recording, even on a four-track) and so I don't have the luxury of nearly limitless tracks like I used to.

I dig what you're saying... I've been doing the same; I find that pushing faders on the old 414 to be much more satisfying than dragging a mouse in a clunky OS 9 interface :)

4) I might be the only one with the problem, but my computer does something weird when I try to export to .aiff...basically it tells me it's been exported, and it will then sit there until I force it to cancel. If I cancel too early, the .aiff doesn't play. I'm not sure what the time limit I have to let it sit there is...something more than five minutes and less than an hour.

Does this still happen with 1.0.1? Are you saying that if you let it sit there for close to an hour, it eventually DOES complete the export properly?

5) Are there or will there be more possible sounds on the registered version? As I've said, I'm not a drummer, and I won't be importing any sounds myself...some things like brush work and stuff like that would be awesome.

Hopefully, soon. I've been putting my energies into programming and not running around bugging drummers to let me record their kits, but it is something I'd like to expand sometime.

6) I think maybe someone has mentioned this, but it would be nice if there was a separate selector on the left for things like the muted snares and so on rather than using the pull down menus.

Yeah, some revamping of the drum kit list will be in the works in the near future.

Just some thoughts, like I said...this is a great program and I'm amazed at how realistic a sound you can get from it. My main problem with using drum tracks and so on is they always sound like a drum machine, and I don't get that feeling nearly as much with doggiebox. Apologies in advance for anything I've mentioned that's already gone through the idea wringer.

Awesome, as I said, your feedback rocks and is exactly the kind of thing that will help make Doggiebox better over time. Thanks! -ben -- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca