Version 2.1
Firstly, congratulations on your choice of software. We know that you will enjoy using djchainz_soundbox for your audio-based work and/or pleasure. Now, to get down to business...
This documentation can be read straight through as a complete guide to the software, but it is also conveniently sectioned for quick reference. Note that you cannot pull it up with the F1 key as that might have some hilarious or destructive consequences during a performance ! The Help guide can be opened whilst the program is running by clicking the menu bottom right and selecting Help.
Some/many sections refer to only the complete edition of the software so those on the basic version need not pay attention to them. They are mostly marked as being features only available in the Complete edition.
Djchainz_soundbox 2.0 is a complete rewrite with new APIs, but your configurations are safe as we included backwards compatibility. If you have installed to the same folder (as should have automatically happened), you can instantly load your previous configurations and go! This new version no longer features automatic duplication of loaded sound files, so any new sounds will not be imported into the sounds folder.
Some things can only be activated by the keyboard and have no immediate controls on the screen. Here is a list of every keyboard control:
djchainz_soundbox has 39 seperate channels which each can have a sound or track loaded into them. Each has seperate controls for the individual sound settings which can be tweaked easily.
The main screen of the software may look daunting at first; so much data and so many controls jampacked into a tiny area ! However, you only need to master one set of controls to be able to manipulate each channel, and the remaining controls are easy enough when you understand them.
The compact nature of all the data on screen is designed so that you can focus on the things you need to immediately. About 90% of the area is taken up by the channels, so this is the next section. The remaining controls are covered afterwards in this guide. Some should be fairly obvious, like the file icons, but others may need a little more explaining.
Each channel has a single-character label (equal to the key that activates it), a vertical volume fader, a horizontal panning fader, a label (the name of the sound loaded), a folder icon, and [in the complete edition] a pitch symbol. Here's what each does:
The icon file controls are at the bottom-left-ish area of the screen and are pretty standard icons. Hovering over them makes them rotate. The new icon (top) creates a new file, the save icon is a save button on left click and an open button on right click, and the exit button is a close button on left click. Very standard, and easy to use.
The dice icon by the file represents the random cueing function. This is an easy to use thing that might be helpful to some, in some situations. Clicking it highlights the icon and turns the function on, and then sounds will be randomly cued until turned off. The gap between sounds is the rhythmic repeat gap, and so based upon the tempo. The random function always selects from one of the loaded sliders and is completely random.
The bottom part of the screen has four distinct areas: The playmode control, the Tempo Controls, the hotkey controls, and the menu button. These control areas are pretty easy to use and will reveal a lot on mouse hover.
The playmode control selects the way the sounds play. Clicking it will reveal the dropdown box listing the various available modes. They all have their musical uses but work in a wide variety of ways. Here is a list:
Tempo in djchainz_soundbox is measured in bpm, or beats-per-minute, and is displayed at the bottom of the screen under the tempo controls area. Tempo can be entered by left/right clicking on the tempo value to increase/decrease it, or by tapping in with spacebar, or by clicking the tap button in the tempo control area.
The Rhythmic Repeat value is the second displayed item in the tempo control box, and is represented as a fraction. This is used by many functions/effects in the program; the transform effect, the rewind repeat, and many others. It is a standard note value and locked to the current tempo. You can change it by clicking to double/halve, and by using note values assigned to the Beatpad.
Hotkeyed configurations can be loaded at the flick of one of the F5 to F8 keys (complete edition only), so that the set of sounds loaded can be very quickly changed. There are two options for loading hotkeyed configurations which load the new sounds/samples into the channels in varying ways. The stop first mode stops all sliders first then loads the entire new hotkeyed file, whereas the smart overwrite mode overwrites the new sounds only over those channels not playing. This overwriting is very useful when using loops.
The hotkeyed files and the mode of which they are to be loaded is found on the configuration screen from the menu bottom right.
The pitch changer gives you various ways to change the pitch of a selected channel (complete edition only), with a ±50% range. There are a few ways to do this as well; a slider, a bpm changer, a semitones changer, and pitchbending. The pitchchanger is opened by clicking the flat/natural/sharp sign at the top right of any channel's area and is closed by clicking its close button top right of the "pitch" panel. The pitchchanger can only be open for one channel at a time, but can be moved by slowly dragging on the "pitch" name tag at the top.
The immediately visible part is the pitch slider than is on the left of the dialog; this can be moved up and down to change the pitch on its logarithmic scale, and snaps to 0.5, 1.0 and 2.0. 1.0 is 100% pitch, i.e. the original sample/sound pitch or speed. The pitchbend buttons are also immediately accessible and can be activated by holding them down. If you want to pitchbend or change pitch in other ways with the keyboard, check out arrowkey control with custom functions.
The bpm changer takes a source tempo (that of the sample) and a destination tempo (that which you want the sample to play at) and calculates the pitch necessary to change the channel. It is very useful for beatmatching two different samples or songs, or for more minute changes of pitch (e.g. set source to 100bpm and you change the pitch by 1% by using a destination tempo of 101bpm). Pressing cancel reverts the pitch of the channel back to the original pitch before the bpm changer was opened.
The semitones changer operates in the same way, but moves in semitones relative to the pitch of the channel when it was opened. You can go up or down 12 semitones, i.e. an octave or 50%, and this way you can tune your samples as you wish. If you want to load a sound multiple times as a scale, see the special load function.
There are many effects in djchainz_soundbox including the transform and rewind repeat, and you can activate them all with the keyboard. Here is a description of every effect:
It might be all very well when you have a nice big mouse and a lot of work area, but when you are cramped up on a mini laptop you don't have much of an option for a mouse. Luckily we have created djchainz_soundbox so that it can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. The arrowkey control lets you affect a selected channel with custom functions that are defined in the configuration; the keys used are the arrowkey up/down/left/right for selection and then the following pairs for effects:Insert/Delete, Home/End, and Page Up/Page Down. You can turn the arrowkey control on/off in the configuration as well as changing the functions for these key pairs.
There are 13 functions in total (counting the None one) and they should be pretty self explanatory. If you need some help with what the functions are actually doing, see the advanced readme section; this is a guide for manually editing the ini as well.
MIDI Input is new to v2.1 Complete Edition and is easy to configure when you know how/what. Here's a guide to configuration from the start:
The channel/note settings need a little more explanation as in djchainz_soundbox we have split up the notes into four groups allowing you to carry out the same functions as on a PC. These groups are the cue group (for cueing the djchainz_soundbox channels), the control group (for control functions such as stop all and mute/transform), the beatpad group (for using the beatpad) and the 'arrowkey' group (for mapping the arrowkey control to MIDI). Setting up the groups is easy enough.
The first thing to configure is the MIDI channel that the group should be on. Simple MIDI keyboards typically send their main output on channel 1 but more advanced devices should give you control over the channels. All the groups can be laid on the same channel if necessary, even overlapping, but this will produce results whereby one note will trigger two or more functions !
The note value is the first note looked for in the group, and you can see where the last note will be as well to the right. The groups are laid out like so:
The djchainz_soundbox channels are mapped from top left in rows, so consecutive channels are consecutive notes on the MIDI device. With MIDI input on you can hover over a channel's PC keyboard label and see the assigned MIDI note number. There are 39 sound channels on djchainz_soundbox so therefore there are 39 notes in this group.
This table shows you the order in which the control group is laid out. The relative note means the number you should add to the base note from the config for the note that controls that function. This group is 9 notes long.
| Relative Note to group first note | Function | Default Note (where base is 36) |
| 0 | Stop All Channels | 36 |
| 1 | Mute / Transform | 37 |
| 2 | Rewind All | 38 |
| 3 | Always On Top | 39 |
| 4 | Tap | 40 |
| 5 | HotkeyA | 41 |
| 6 | HotkeyB | 42 |
| 7 | HotkeyC | 43 |
| 8 | HotkeyD | 44 |
The beatpad is simply laid out 'in order' from the base note. The first note in the series activates the rhythmic value assigned to 1 on the numpad and the last note activates the value assigned to 3 on the numpad. The order of the numpad keys is 1,4,7,8,9,6,3 as displayed on the beatpad configuration. This group is 7 notes long.
This 10 note group simply maps to the keyboard keys as the arrowkey functions are changeable themselves.
| Relative Note to group first note | Key/Function | Default Note (where base is 36) |
| 0 | Insert | 36 |
| 1 | Delete | 37 |
| 2 | Home | 38 |
| 3 | End | 39 |
| 4 | Page Up | 40 |
| 5 | Page Down | 41 |
| 6 | Arrowkey Up | 42 |
| 7 | Arrowkey Down | 43 |
| 8 | Arrowkey Left | 44 |
| 9 | Arrowkey Right | 45 |
The menu can be brought up by clicking on the menu button bottom right of the screen. It has a few options that access various dialogs for the general configuration of the program. The following options appear on the menu:
The beatpad is a very useful tool, only available in the complete edition. Using the numpad on the keyboard, you can change to a different tempo-locked note value repeat rate by merely pressing a button. Somewhat like a certain 'performance effector' on some pioneering hardware fx units. You can disable the beatpad on the configuration screen (see below), and moreover, unlike fixed units you can assign different rhythmic values to the keys.
The beatpad uses the numpad keys 1/4/6/8/9/6/3 and is not sensitive to the numlock button. Pressing any of these keys changes the rhythmic repeat value (as seen in the tempo control section at the bottom of the screen). This rhythmic repeat value is used for many many things; the transform effect, rewinding sounds with the TAB key, the fire playmode and a variety of other things. Changing the rhythmic repeat value dynamically and quickly allows you to create various rhythms on the fly.
Configuring the beatpad values from the menu (click the menu bottom right and then beatpad) is easy; simply choose the notation values respective to the keys by using the lengthy drop down boxes. A large number of different rhythmic values have been written into djchainz_soundbox, and if you are familiar with music you should recognise them. They are named in shorthand using the numeric "Americanised" values, such as 1/1; they are fractions of a beat. The English (correct musical term) for the note values is displayed only on the beatpad menu. See the Wikipedia Note Value page for more about the length of and naming of notes (djchainz_soundbox does not yet support quasihemidemisemiquavers unfortunately !).
The special load dialog is there for loading a sound file into a channel and then duplicating it across a series of adjacent channels whilst chaning the pitch. It does this in specific musical intervals to load scales; Major, Minor, Modal and variations. There is also an option to load a sound into a series of 10 channels without changing pitch (to save time if you want a mass load).
The dialog takes input in a series so that it can load the scale. First, select the file by clicking the "..." button, and then browsing for it (the mod file types are still listed though they cannot change in pitch). Then select the type of scale in the dropdown box, and check ascending or descending. The channel no is for the one containing the first note of the scale, and all channels are numbered from 1 top left increasing across and then down. The last checkbox allows you to shift the entire scale down an octave so the highest note will be that of the sample loaded, as opposed to the lowest note.
Press OK to load the scale; it may take a few seconds if you have a slow pc or it is a very long sample.
The currently available scales are:
Find out more about scales on the wikipedia musical scales page.
The configuration screen is a scrollable area containing controls for all the fiddley and interesting settings, though some special cheatcodes can be turned on and off by manually editing the ini (see the advanced readme)(info for that below). You can turn features on and off and configure their parameters on this screen. The OK button applies your settings and closes the blocking dialog, the reset button undoes all your changes and the cancel button resets and closes without applying the settings.
Note: users of the basic edition need only read about the miscellaneous settings at the last section.
The first general settings list those for the hotkeyed files, where you can load a different config for these by clicking the "..." button to the right of the fields and also change the mode in which the hotkeyed files are loaded.
The second section refers to the arrowkey control and lets you turn it on/off and select functions for the arrowkey pairs. There are 13 different functions in each dropdown box and so you can have a lot of customisation for the functionality of the arrowkey control. Note that turning arrowkey transform on means the global transform effect does not affect the selected channel.
The next section refers to the transform effect and lets you turn it off and on, as well as configuring the space or minimum volume, and the mark or maximum volume. These volumes are used both in the transform all and in the arrowkey transform effect.
The final miscellaneous settings give some extra options; in the Complete edition you can configure whether the tab key always repeats and whether to draw a line to link the pitchchanger to its current channel. The remaining settings are shared between both editions; the framerate is how many frames the program draws per second, the framerate out of focus is the number of frames drawn per second when the window is not visible, and the delay time is the responsiveness. A faster framerate or shorter delay time will result in more CPU usage, but will give smoother graphics in the case of the framerate or faster responsiveness and more accurate effects in the case of the delay time.
There are many extra settings available for djchainz_soundbox, some of which are just minor tweaks and some are beyond the average user's requirements. You can edit these settings by opening up config.ini and following the special advanced readme for reference for all the settings and values.
One of the neatest settings to be added to v2.1 (Complete Edition only) is the ability to skin the graphical interface so that it looks different. We have developed two extra skins with the product; one alternate colour and one very minimalist version. To skin, you will need to edit the ini.
Hey, I thought it was all over !
Once again, thanks for choosing djchainz_soundbox, it will not upset you in the field!