Introduction to Doggiebox

Doggiebox is a versatile percussion sequencer for the Mac, designed with power and ease-of-use in mind. Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional musician, Doggiebox provides the flexibility and precision to create realistic drum tracks in minutes.

Key features

With Doggiebox, you can:

Create percussion tracks of unlimited length and complexity, including arbitrary tempo and time signature changes.
Input and adjust events using the mouse, the keyboard, or any MIDI input device.
Define, arrange and re-use sections (such as verses and choruses) by dragging and dropping, for efficient song building.
Export songs as audio files, or play them back in real time through any MIDI-compliant device or application.
Create and customize drum kits using your own sounds and iconography, and try out different kits while working on a song.
And more…

While having some background in music theory will help you get the most out of Doggiebox, it's not necessary.

System requirements

Doggiebox requires a Mac running MacOS 10.9 (Mavericks) or later. However, MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) or 11.2 (Big Sur) is recommended. (Older versions of Doggiebox support historical versions of MacOS.)

If you have MIDI equipment (such as a keyboard, hardware drum machine, or other software) you can use it in conjunction with Doggiebox, too.

Songs and drum kits

Doggiebox introduces two document types which you will encounter while working on a song.

Doggiebox song (.dbsong file): This contains the basic data for a particular song (its bars, sections and other information), much like the words in a text document. You'll create one of these for each new project. It does not contain any audio data, but instead points to a Doggiebox drum kit to use. Song files are small.

Doggiebox drum kit (.dbkit file): This contains the actual audio waveform data for each instrument in the drum kit, along with related information (like MIDI assignments, icon graphics and kit structure). Drum kit files can be quite large.

By distinguishing between songs and drum kits, Doggiebox lets you easily share common drum kits between many songs while saving space and making management easier.

What is a song?

At its core, a song consists of a bunch of sounds played in a certain order at a specified tempo. While tuneful melodies consist of musical notes and songs made with Doggiebox generally describe percussive events, both types of song share similar qualities. Fundamentally, they are organized into groups of notes called bars or measures. In Doggiebox, we also use the term pattern. Like a bar of a melody, a pattern in Doggiebox has a time signature (which describes its rhythmic form) and tempo (the speed at which its notes are played).

Doggiebox takes song-building a step further by allowing you to group patterns into a section for manipulation as a unit. A song built in several sections may then be easily re-arranged during composition. What's more, you can re-use a section more than once by way of the song's playlist. Any changes made within a section will take effect automatically throughout the song.