Doggiebox 1.3 Review
Drum Sequencing for the Masses
03 June 2005 Matt Willmore Skip to comments
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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.
Since the release of Apple's iLife suite and its GarageBand composition application, amateur and wannabe musicians have sprung forth from the woodwork, eager to make their own masterpiece. The problem with apps like GarageBand that come preloaded with samples is that the samples can become old pretty quickly. Enter Zygoat's Doggiebox 1.3, an awesome little app that satisfies your need to create your own drum sequences. Whether using Doggiebox's bundled drum kits, crafting your own kits or playing sequences through your MIDI device, Doggiebox fills an important gap between Apple's GarageBand and the GarageBand user's desire to expand the percussion side of his or her creations. Let's take a more in-depth look at what Doggiebox has to offer.
Note: The version of Doggiebox reviewed here is the beta of Doggiebox 1.3, although 1.2 is the most current publicly available released. You may not find some of the features I discuss here in the current 1.2 release. Be patient — it's on the way!
Installation, Registration, and Documentation
The installation of Doggiebox couldn't be simpler. The downloaded archive expands into a folder containing the application, a sample song, drum kits and an HTML user manual of BBEdit proportions. Drag the Doggiebox folder into your Applications folder, and you're all set. Registration is equally as simple. When the registration key arrives in your inbox, copy the string to your clipboard. When you launch Doggiebox, it reads the key in your clipboard and you're done! This is easily the simplest way to register an app with a registration key and makes Apple's famously long serial numbers that much more painful to type in.
I found another nice touch when reading through the User's Manual. There are copious screenshots and diagrams, but I assumed they were being pulled from the Web. In reality, the images are tucked away within the application package. (In fact, if you summon Doggiebox's help contents, it presents a copy of the same file, this one being located with the images in the Doggiebox package.) This is clever and a nice use of the package structure of Cocoa applications. The Doggiebox help isn't in the standard format you'd find by using the Help Viewer app but it fits the documentation model well.
Creating Sequences
The model for creating sequences in Doggiebox is nicely laid out and works well, but contains some minor quirks. The main window for each song contains text fields for the title and a note, the main editing region (referred to as the pattern editor), instruments in the drum kit, playback controls and lists for sections and playlists. Within the pattern editor, new files start out without any measures. To add a measure, select Insert Bar from the Song menu, or you can hit command-shift-I. (Although absent in the build I tested, the public release of 1.3 will have the ability to add multiple measures at once by hitting command-option-shift-I or option-clicking the Insert Bars button in the Song Inspector.) The command to delete bars is found in the same menu, but you have to highlight the entire measure to delete it; highlighting only a fraction of a measure will delete just the number of beats highlighted. It's a nice feature, but can be confusing to someone who isn't expecting it. Instead of a single Delete Beats command, how about having the Delete key perform deletions of individual beats and assigning command-Delete to deleting entire measures? This very question is being debated on the Doggiebox discussion list, if you'd like to contribute your opinion.
Along the top of the each measure, Doggiebox displays information about that measure. If no information is present in that measure's header, then it is maintaining the characteristics (tempo, time signature, section) of the previous measure. Below the header is a grid which breaks each measure horizontally into beats and then vertically into instrument groups. Each instrument is represented by a unique icon that can be set by editing the drum kit. According to Doggiebox's documentation, each row is dedicated to indicating a particular instrument group from top to bottom: accessory cymbals, rhythmic cymbals, secondary drums, principal drums and foot-operated drums. While putting Doggiebox through its paces I ran into the issue of using more than one of the same category of instrument; Doggiebox solves this by scooting the icons around vertically to make room for each new instrument. Once you've filled up those five spaces, the beat is full. This isn't representative of real-life playing, however; it's hard to imagine more than three instruments being hit on the same exact beat (think two hands plus a foot pedal). As a result you shouldn't face any problems writing realistic sequences.
Once you have your sequence built, there is complete flexibility in how little or much it stays in the same form. Besides deleting beats and measures, you can also remove instruments. The easiest way to do this is to hold down the option key, which will turn the cursor into an eraser. Clicking any instrument's icon will delete that instrument from that beat. Another way to do this is to select the instrument you want to remove. Clicking on any instance of the instrument in the pattern editor will then remove the instrument beat. You can also change the tempo of the sequence in two fashions. To change the overall tempo, you can adjust the slider under the pattern editor. You can also change the tempo of one or more measures by selecting any part of the affected measure and changing the tempo with the Song Inspector, available from the Window menu. The Song Inspector is also handy for inserting bars, inserting and removing beats and altering the time signature — again, this can be applied on a per-measure basis.
Another playback control is a volume slider. This applies to the entire piece and can be dynamically changed. If you want to change the intensity of a particular instance of a beat all you do is hold down command and control-click (or right-click) the icon to adjust its volume. Also in the playback area you'll find repeat and mono toggles and zoom control. One minor thing about the zoom controls that might trip new users up is that the zoom is only applied to selected measures. This can lead to confusion when, during a string of measures with the same time signature, some measures are more expanded than others. Smaller, gray numbers under the sequence grid in the pattern editor will count off individual beats, which can help you identify expanded measures.
The drum kit list will display every instrument in the kit, as well as its icon and a pulldown menu arrow if more than one variation of that particular instrument is available. Using Ben's Premier Kit as example, you can see that there are multiple variations of most every instrument. Everything about the kit is editable, which is discussed below. The last two items in the song editor window are the list of sections and the playlist. Sections allow you to create individual pieces in a song; the playlist stitches them together in whichever order you like. This enables you to only write a repeating drum sequence of a song (like the refrain) only once and call it as many times as you like. Doggiebox also allows you to duplicate sections, which means you can create copies of a "safe" sequence and experiment with variations without altering the original sequence. When you export the sequence the track will be composed from the playlist's order.
The Drum Kit Editor
Equally as powerful as the sequence editor, Doggiebox's Drum Kit Editor is used to create and modify drum kits used to create sequences. It's easiest to see what the editor is capable of by working with an existing kit such as Ben's Premier Kit, which comes with Doggiebox. Drum kits can be created and opened from the File menu. The first feature worth noting is the ability to link sound files. Instead of maintaining copies of sound files for each kit you can have a link to a sound file. This is helpful if you're using a common set of sounds but have separate kits for each style, genre, etc. However, if you want to share the kit you'll have to make sure to include the original sound files. If you link files instead of save them with the kit you'll see a gray arrow instead of the blue waveform icon. Examples of this can be seen with the two bundled GarageBand kits. If Doggiebox cannot find the linked audio file when the drum kit is opened, a search is triggered by the the Fix Links button. You can also use the Set Prompt... button to set a message that can appear when the Fix Links button is clicked. This message is intended to instruct the user on where the files may be.
Below those buttons every instrument in the kit is listed. Here you can assign which instrument (or variant) it is, view MIDI message information and see if it is linked or embedded. Changing the MIDI message information is easy; at the bottom of the window, you can adjust the channel, note and velocity. If you're like me and would like to change up the hit intensity this is where that is set. To the right of that is the icon area where you can set the icon (or load in your own) and set the placement in the five rows of the pattern editor. Above the MIDI message area is the waveform area, where you can view the waveform of the sound file, change the sound file's volume and panning, preview the sound and load existing files. To the right of the waveform area, Doggiebox even gives you the ability to to assign a keyboard shortcut to the instrument to save time.
Expansion
I had fun playing with the prepackaged drum kits but soon had a desire for more sounds. Fortunately, Zygoat maintains a small drum kit and song library where you can download new kits and compositions, both to give you inspiration and more beats to work with. Think of it as the Doggiebox equivalent of GarageBand's loop and instrument libraries. If you still can't find that special beat, the next step is to create your own drum kit. There are variety of ways to do so, many of which have been demonstrated in downloadable kits. One of the coolest examples of this is a drum kit using sounds from the old school Roland TR-808. If you have a synth machine you can easily make your own drum set using Doggiebox's included MIDI interface. You can record analog instruments with an analog mic and your Mac's Sound In port.
It was along this line that I encountered a frustration with Doggiebox. While I was experimenting with different drum sets, I discovered that I liked certain beats from each set and wanted to use them together. Unfortunately there's no way to do this from within Doggiebox. If you have a beat pattern established with a certain drum kit and load a different drum kit, it will remove the first kit and replace all the sounds you made with corresponding sounds in the new kit. Also, while viewing multiple drum kits you cannot drag individual instruments from one kit to another. However, you can copy one or more instruments in one drum kit and paste them into another drum kit, which isn't bad at all.
There are some methods to work around this. The first way works best when you have one or two instruments that you wish to use from another drum kit. In this case, open the kit with the desired instruments, save them (in the Waveform box) as AIFF files and load them into the other kit (again, in the Waveform box). The other way is to make a new drum kit for a particular project or song. I find this option particularly attractive when I'm working on a longer piece that has a mix of instruments from various drum kits. To do this, create a new drum kit from the File menu and populate it by extracting tracks from existing drum kits. You can also view the contents of drum kit files, which are actually packages (starting in Doggiebox 1.2). In that you will find the data file, as well as a folder named Sounds. In this folder you will find every source file that drum kit uses.
Note: This only applies to drum kits that have the actual sound file. Linked files will not appear in the drum kit file.
Using Doggiebox with GarageBand
Once you've made a sequence, how do you get completed beats and loops out of Doggiebox? Doggiebox allows you to export the drum sequences you create as either AIFF or MIDI files. Although GarageBand will accept either, most users will be satisfied with exporting as AIFF. Before you pull your masterpiece into GarageBand, however, I would recommend sending the file through Apple's free Soundtrack Loop Utility, part of the AppleLoops SDK 1.1. By using the SLU you can assign keywords and other metadata to the file as well as save it as an Apple Loop file — the official loop format of GarageBand. Once your exported, tagged songs are imported into GarageBand they will behave just like the loops packaged with iLife.
A cool trick that I learned from Doggiebox's chief developer, Ben Kennedy, is how to pipe Doggiebox's output straight into GarageBand. This is done by setting Doggiebox's MIDI output to the IAC bus; play the drum sequence and GarageBand will be able to listen to (and record!) the sequence.
Note: See the MacZealots.com tutorial on expanding your GarageBand library, which covers the Soundtrack Loop Utility in detail.
Improvements; Conclusion
With an app like Doggiebox, what's left to improve? I did find a few features that I would like included in the application. First, many users are going to be bringing these sequences into GarageBand and using them as Apple Loops. The ability to export the sequence as an Apple Loop and populate the metadata from within Doggiebox would be very handy. The ability to mass-import audio files would also be nice. Overall, these are very small items, but ones I believe are worthy of consideration.
In conclusion, Doggiebox fills its niche very well. For users of GarageBand who are looking to expand their selection of drum loops or make their own, this is an ideal utility. Although it functions well enough with the included drum kits and the additional ones available on the Web, it really shines when you use it in conjunction with a MIDI device. Not only is the pattern creation more natural, but also much more rapid. Aside from a few desires and some minor quirks, this is a quality application and deserves an hour of your time. Zygoat's Doggiebox is available for purchase and download for $39.
Matt Willmore is a founding partner of MacZealots.com. Matt is also a Resident Assistant at Owen Hall and does Mac support at ECN, and is active in PUMUG. He can be reached at .
Reader Comments (5)
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#1) On August 17, 2005 6:13 PM
I have been using DoggieBox for almost a year now, and my friend, who has always hated the normal drum sequencers, thought that I had used a real drummer for some demo tracks I was working on.
DoggieBox is a great program for people who want thier work to move along quickly….
I HIGHLY recommend this great app!
Jimmy
#2) On September 9, 2005 2:09 PM
Great review! I already use Doggiebox, but I was unaware of the new version and will be upgrading this weekend. It’s one of the best pieces of software I’ve bought since I started using a Mac about 3 years ago.
#3) On October 27, 2005 7:20 PM
In short, I have set up drum sets that “no one” could tell that it’s not a real drummer. However, sometimes I do take an artistic liberty with my power to manipulate D.B. This is by faaaaaar the premier drum sequencing program. The demo sets…..(marginal) The sets the user creates; only limited by ones imagination! My only wish is that the Icons used for the left shelf were adjustable in size. Reason being, it gets a little hard to focus after countless hours of D.B. or working with Drum Sets containing 200 to 250 snares alone. Any way, I love it
Bravo!!!!
#4) On November 14, 2005 11:46 PM
Make your drums in Doggiebox. Export to midi. Drag the midi file onto a midi track in Cubase. Set the output to your favorite drum VSTi. Battery, BFD, Groove Agent, Plugsound, etc. It just works. It’s the only way I do drums now.
#5) On February 7, 2006 1:51 PM
Doggie box is a true masterpiece and a really easy one to use at that, works very well with other sequencers and makes for good industrial drum loops when dragged out and morphed. it works vey well with metal too, a big cheers to Ben Kennedy and Zygoat!!!
Eire Abu