What's new in Doggiebox

Doggiebox 2.1 (released 12 February 2021) includes a slew of long-awaited under-the-hood improvements to once again support the latest MacOS and newest Macs.

Now a 64-bit Universal sandboxed app, supporting MacOS 10.15 “Catalina” and 11.2 “Big Sur” on Intel and M1 Macs.
Updated suite of six GarageBand drum kits (requires Apple GarageBand 10.5).
A new preference setting “Include pre-release (development) versions” will fetch such builds when checking for updates.
Numerous internal changes to support modern architecture and updated APIs.

Bugs fixed since 2.0.2:

Fixed crash when loading a drum kit with linked sound files that can’t be found.
Fixed crash when trying to Revert in the drum kit editor.
Fixed bug where doing “Save As” of a drum kit more than once would create a corrupted kit.
Fixed bug where exporting sounds or saving drum kits containing non-LPCM sound files could fail.
Fixed bug that prevented adding linked sounds to a new un-saved drum kit.
After re-linking sound files, substitutions are remembered without having to re-save the drum kit.

Songs and drum kits now track their related files in a sandbox-compliant manner. You may be prompted to locate a drum kit the first time you open an existing song.

MacOS 10.9 or newer is now required.

Introducing Doggiebox 2.0

Doggiebox 2.0.2 (released 02 August 2012) included the following improvements:

Fixed a bug that could cause drum kits with linked sound files (e.g. the GarageBand kits) to not load properly.
Fixed a bug that could cause extra silence in the output file when exporting a selection.
Resolved some potential launch crashes and memory leaks.
Mac OS X 10.6.8 or newer is now required.

Doggiebox 2.0.1 (released 15 February 2012) included the following improvements:

A number of bugs affecting stability and memory leaks have been fixed.
Doggiebox is now available in the Mac App Store, in addition to being purchasable directly online.

Released 22 August 2011, Doggiebox 2.0 is a significant and long-awaited update that brings a number of new features, improvements and bug fixes. Read about upgrading from Doggiebox 1.x, or download now.

The following sections describe the highlights. If you are upgrading, you will find that a number of things have changed.

Improved song and pattern editing

Navigation and editing controls are now in a floating tool palette.
Playback begins at the insertion point, and the playhead can now be moved around freely using cursor keys or the mouse.
The current playhead position is now shown, in bars and beats as well as minutes and seconds.
New drag and drop support in the pattern editor lets you re-arrange bars by dragging them, or make a copy by holding the Option key.
The drum kit palette is now a floating window, with better arrangement. Drum shortcut keys are shown in tool tips.
New contextual (right-click) menus are available in many places, including in the pattern editor as well as the section and playlists.
A new recording mode allows drums to be inserted at the playhead location by pressing their shortcut keys, or in response to MIDI messages.
An arbitrary sample rate and bit depth may now be chosen when exporting audio files.
It is now possible to export a separate mix for each of the instrument groups assigned in the drum kit.
Significant improvements during drum kit reconciliation when switching kits in a song. In particular, your mapping choices are now remembered and used as defaults.

Improved drum kit editing

Sound files of any sample rate and bit depth may now be assigned to instruments. (Previously, only 44.1 kHz mono or stereo sounds were supported.)
Drum kits can now feature any number of instrument groups; the pattern editor will change accordingly. (Previously, there were always five.)
The drum kit components are now presented in a column-based view, allowing for easier management.
Undo and redo is now supported for all actions, as well as multi-row selection for copy/paste and drag & drop operations.
New contextual (right-click) menus are available in many places throughout the drum kit editor.

General improvements

Doggiebox will now check for and install new software updates automatically.
Documents that were left open on last quit are now automatically re-opened. The position and size of document windows are now also saved and restored.
Richer information is now exported to MIDI files, including time signature changes as well as song name and notes.
Changes made to preferences are now reflected immediately.
The Doggiebox User's Guide has been entirely rewritten.

Other user interface changes

A number of lesser details have changed slightly, which might be of note if you are upgrading from Doggiebox 1.4.3.

Zooming now behaves more conventionally. You can hold the Option key to zoom the selected pattern(s) independently of the rest.
To cycle through an instrument's variants with the keyboard, you must now press the Option key along with its shortcut.
The File menu's Export commands now export the entire song. Use the new Export Selection commands to export arbitrary patterns.
The beat selection cursor is now exposed when hovering the mouse near the top of the pattern, rather than by holding the Option key as previously.
Pressing the Home/End keys (or Command-Up/Down) will now go to the top and bottom, respectively, in the pattern editor as well as the section list and playlist.
Looping and mono fold-down modes are now global, instead of on a per-song basis.
Added a preference to toggle MIDI MMC/MTC output, so it can be turned off if not needed.
The master tempo slider, as well as several vestigial preferences options, have been removed.
Various cosmetic improvements throughout.

In addition to the above, a numerous assortment of other bugs have also been fixed.

Mac OS X 10.5 or newer is now required.

Songs and drum kits saved with Doggiebox 2.0 are backward-compatible with Doggiebox 1.3.