dAVEBOx

A standalone 8-track MIDI sequencer and live environment for Ableton Move.

dAVEBOx turns a Move into a session machine: eight tracks of clips on the pads, each track playing either one of Move's own instruments or a hosted synth (OB-Xd, Dexed, and the rest of the Schwung module ecosystem), with per-clip note effects, conditions and automation, a conductor track for harmonic movement, retrospective capture, and a full browser editor on the same WiFi.

It runs as its own session on the device. The official firmware and the official Schwung install are never modified — launching dAVEBOx relaunches Move under this repo's host build, leaving stock untouched on disk, and a reboot (even a power cut) always returns the device to stock exactly as it was. Your Move sets are never touched either: dAVEBOx keeps its own project workspace and swaps it in only while a session runs.

Highlights

• 8 tracks × 16 scenes of melodic and drum clips, launched from the pads, with per-step conditions, ratchets, nudge and probability.
• One instrument per track, nothing to route: one of Move's own instruments, a hosted synth (OB-Xd, Dexed and the rest of the Schwung module ecosystem), or external MIDI.
• Four insert effects per track (reorderable), Send A/B buses, Master FX and two LFOs per track, on hosted synths and Move tracks alike.
• MACROS: one knob drives several parameters, each with its own range; MIDI CC, aftertouch and pitch bend are targets too.
• Sound snapshots and SnapMorph: save and recall a track's sound, and glide between snapshots on one knob.
• Automation for any parameter — instrument, effect, level or dAVEBOx's own — with lanes of their own length, Curve/Punch and Wrap, hold-a-step editing, and Capture that keeps knob moves. It exports to Live with the rest of the project.
• Note effects per clip: harmony, MIDI delay with pitch/velocity feedback, arpeggiator, quantise/gate/velocity shaping, all sequenceable.
• Chord and Piano pad layouts, step recording, Import MIDI, and Crop.
• A conductor track that shifts responding tracks harmonically as its own clips play, and retrospective capture — what you just played is already recorded.
• Projects on the pads, kept apart from your Move sets, and Move's own settings reachable from Project Settings — dAVEBOx keeps its own copy, so your Move's settings stay as they are.
• The browser editor at http://move.local:7700: dAVEBOx's own sequencer, mixer and sound-editing pages, live in both directions, a real-time mirror of the device's screen, and the full manual on its Help page.
• Boot straight into dAVEBOx (hold Back at power-on), and instruments render in parallel across the Move's cores.

Installing

dAVEBOx installs like any other Schwung module, and the first launch does the rest itself. The current builds are test builds — not in the Schwung catalog yet — so the tarball comes from this repo's Releases page:

1. Download davebox-sa-module.tar.gz from the newest release.
2. In Schwung Manager (http://move.local:7700): Modules → Install Custom Module → From Tarball → Install from File, and pick the tarball.
3. On the Move: Shift + Step 13 (Tools) → dAVEBOx SA. The first launch lays the dAVEBOx host beside stock and asks stock Schwung's own helper to bless dAVEBOx's — about a minute, once. Every later launch is a launch.

To remove it, install davebox-uninstall-module.tar.gz from the same release the same way and run Uninstall dAVEBOx SA from Tools. Your projects and settings are kept.

Prerequisites: an Ableton Move with stock Schwung 1.3.0 or newer installed. On a stock Schwung that lacks the "bless a tool's helper" step (schwung#419) the first launch stops before touching anything and the launch log names the one manual command:

# only on a stock Schwung without #419 — once, as root
ssh root@move.local 'sh /data/UserData/schwung/modules/tools/davebox-sa/payload/scripts/layout-install.sh \
    /data/UserData/schwung/modules/tools/davebox-sa/payload /data/UserData/dbx-host /data/UserData/schwung && \
    sh /data/UserData/dbx-host/bless.sh'

Stock Schwung is never modified — dAVEBOx runs Move under its own build beside it, and a reboot always returns to stock.

Developers: standalone/scripts/install-sa.sh builds and deploys the whole deliverable over SSH to an existing install (the update loop); standalone/scripts/build-sa-release.sh assembles the release tarball the release workflow publishes. See standalone/README.md.

Once installed: stock Schwung's Tools menu → dAVEBOx SA starts a session; Quit in Project Settings (Shift + Step 2) hands the device back to stock.

Documentation

• The dAVEBOx Manual — the complete user manual, with every screen pictured. It is also on the browser editor's Help page, and attached to each release as dAVEBOx-SA-manual.html.
• CHANGELOG — what's new.
• docs/ — architecture, module and API references for the underlying framework, and the OLED UI specification.

Relationship to Schwung

This repo contains the whole deliverable in one place: the sequencer module (davebox/), a host — a fork of stock Schwung (MIT) carrying the changes dAVEBOx depends on — the browser editor and its web server, and the launcher and installer. upstream is the stock Schwung repo, fetch-only; changes that are generic are still offered upstream as PRs. For the framework's own documentation (writing modules, the JS/DSP APIs), see stock Schwung's README and docs/MODULES.md here.

dAVEBOx Legacy — the earlier version that ran as an ordinary module inside stock Schwung — lives at schwung-davebox and is frozen. This standalone line is its successor; sessions are not compatible between the two.

License

MIT, as inherited from Schwung — see LICENSE.

One shipped binary is licensed more strictly than the source: the shim links eSpeak NG for the screen reader, so schwung-shim.so is conveyed under GPL-3.0-or-later, and link-subscriber (Ableton Link) is GPL-2.0-or-later. See THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.