Pegbox™ Manual

Who it's for

Built for film, TV, and commercial sound editors and designers who cut in Pro Tools and keep landing on the same signature sounds across a series or a film. Also built for Foley artists: cut a performance once, and it goes straight into your own Workspace library — footsteps, cloth, prop hits — ready to hunt down and re-spot into Pro Tools on the next project instead of re-performing it from scratch. And for sound-design performers generally, who trigger repeated hits (typing, texting, gunfire) and currently do it on a hardware sampler. It isn't a catalog tool like Soundminer, Soundly, or SoundQ — those manage huge commercial libraries you search. Workspace is smaller and more personal on purpose: it's where you administer and hunt down the specific sounds you already know by heart on this project, so the one you want is a glance and a keystroke away.

Quick start

Installing

Pegbox needs macOS 15 or later and runs natively on Apple silicon and Intel Macs. Open the downloaded Pegbox.dmg and drag Pegbox onto the Applications shortcut beside it. Pegbox is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, with the notarization ticket attached to the app itself, so Gatekeeper accepts it even on a Mac that's offline. The first time you open it, macOS asks you to confirm opening an app downloaded from the internet — click Open.

Pro Tools: one-key spotting onto a named track, through Pro Tools Scripting, needs Pro Tools 2025.6 or later; Pegbox is verified with Pro Tools 2026.4. With an earlier version there is nothing to set: the first spot finds that Pro Tools doesn't have the Scripting spot commands, goes out through the Legacy Spot API (Apple Events) instead, and so does every spot after it until Pro Tools is relaunched — Settings ▸ Pro Tools says so. Binding sounds to tracks needs Pro Tools 2023.9 or later; before that a bound sound lands on the selected track and the status line tells you its binding was ignored, and a whole stem set can't be spotted in one go (spot or drag its stems one at a time). Drag-and-drop works with any version, and so does transport control over MMC or HUI.

What macOS asks the first time

Each of these appears once. Declining one only turns off the part of Pegbox that needs it.

Help in the app

Help ▸ Pegbox Help (⌘?) shows the ElevenLabs key steps and the support address. Help ▸ Pegbox Manual opens this manual.

Unlocking

Paste the key from your Gumroad receipt in either of two places: Settings ▸ License, or the sheet from the app menu's Unlock Pegbox… item (it reads Licence… once Pegbox is unlocked). Click Unlock; Buy Pegbox opens the Gumroad page. Unlocking needs an internet connection that one time: Pegbox sends the key to Gumroad's license check and asks whether it's valid for Pegbox.

Three Macs per key

One key unlocks Pegbox on 3 Macs (3 per seat on a multi-seat license). Each Mac you unlock counts toward that. The license is kept in the Mac's keychain, so reinstalling Pegbox on the same Mac doesn't count again. A key whose Macs are all in use is refused, and that refusal doesn't use up another place; the message tells you to email support, who can reset it — info@dbsoundlabs.com. Remove from This Mac (Settings ▸ License, or the same sheet) forgets the key on this Mac but doesn't give its place back, so unlocking again counts as another Mac; ask support when you move to a new machine.

The monthly check

About every 30 days, when the Mac is online, Pegbox asks Gumroad about the key again. If the Mac is offline, or Gumroad can't be reached or answers with an error, nothing changes and Pegbox asks again later — an offline Mac is never locked out. Check Again, in Settings ▸ License or the license sheet, runs the check at once and says what it found: that Gumroad confirmed the key, or that it couldn't be reached and nothing changed.

Refunds and disabled keys

When Gumroad answers that a key was refunded, charged back, or switched off, or that it doesn't exist for Pegbox, that check returns the Mac to the free version and says so in the status bar. Nothing in your library is deleted; the free limits apply to adding again.

Drop a file directly onto the Transcribe or Voice Isolator half of its drawer and Pegbox switches to that tab and starts the job immediately — no need to open the drawer first.

Library & files

Sounds live in one library package — by default ~/Documents/Pegbox Library.pegboxlibrary. Use File ▸ New / Open / Open Recent / Import / Export to work with more than one. Double-clicking a library in the Finder opens it too: Pegbox asks first, saves the one that's open, and relaunches into the other. Backups are kept outside the library, in a folder per library under File ▸ Reveal Backups Folder; each one's Library.txt names the library it belongs to, and Clean Up tells you when backups of libraries you no longer have are taking up space.

Sidebar

The Pegboard sits at the top as a pinboard row; your category tree follows below it — collapsible, color-coded, drag to reorder or nest, right-click for New Category or New Series. Series (collections) list separately beneath the regular tree. Drop a Finder folder onto the sidebar to build a category straight from it, or link it as a watched folder.

Views & search

Three views, one per category: ⌘1 Tiles (icons only), ⌘2 Stack, ⌘3 List. Stack and List share the same resizable, sortable column table, modeled on Pro Tools' own Workspace browser; Stack adds a file-type icon per row. Right-click any column header for the full list, grouped: Measured (Length, Rate, Peak, RMS, First Hit), Yours (Tags, Filename, Folder, Alts, Also In), Embedded (Description, Category, Keywords, Library, Designer, Notes, Originator, Project, Scene, Take, Show, Mic, Unique ID, Fingerprint), and Music (Key, Tempo, Time Sig, Author) — that last group is editable right in the row, same fields as the Edit Sound sheet.

⌘F searches the open category. ⌘⇧F — Search Everywhere — searches the whole library at once and behaves exactly like any other category: audition, spot, drag, and right-click all work straight on the results. A Filter menu narrows to All Sounds, ★ Favorites, or a specific tag.

Long cues & music metadata

Select exactly one sound in Stack view and a full-width, high-resolution waveform opens above the table — built fresh for that one clip, so a two-minute music cue doesn't just look like a flat blur the way its row thumbnail does. Click anywhere on it to preview from that point. Click and drag to mark a range instead: a highlighted band appears with a handle on each edge, and the exact time range prints next to the sound's name (14.92s – 24.88s, with an ✕ to clear it).

Drag that band out and you get just that segment as its own new file, dropped wherever you aim it. Press S / SPOT instead, and the whole file lands on the track with its clip bounded to the same range — so a music editor can find the exact passage that fits the picture inside a much longer cue and place it without ever trimming the source file by hand. Tempo reads straight from a file's own embedded metadata where a library provides it; when a Pro Tools Workspace bounce only wrote the raw tick data behind a tempo, Pegbox derives the BPM itself rather than leave the column blank.

Stem sets

A cue delivered as separate stems — drums, bass, a full mix — becomes one tile. Pegbox groups them automatically when files share a sample rate, length, and BWF timestamp plus a common cue name, or from a folder of similar-length bounces. By hand: Group Stem Sets or Import Folder as Stem Set… on a category, or select several tiles and choose Group N as Stems; Ungroup Stems on a stem-set tile reverses it, giving the tiles back as they were — icons, tags, stars and Pegboard pins included. The tiles have to be in one category to be grouped, a backup snapshot is taken first either way, and Find matches a cue by its stems' names too. A joined L/R stereo file and its mono pair count as one stem, not two.

The live stems play summed together on one player, leveled by the mix — or all stems together when none was delivered as a dedicated mix. Click a stem to solo it, ⌘-click to add more to the solo. A stem-set tile gets its own face, badge, and border in the grid; dragging one out delivers every stem file at once, or just the highlighted stems for a subset.

SPOT on the cue as delivered places the mix and every stem, each on its own bound track, all at the cursor, all-or-nothing, cropped identically so they stay in sync. With stems muted or soloed it places what you hear — the live stems only, without the mix. A cue set to spot at its loudest hit puts its sync point (the orange marker in the Stack) on the cursor, stems still in lock — this needs the Pro Tools Scripting link connected (Settings ▸ Pro Tools), since it's placing several clips on several tracks at once. Spotting a single stem by itself, from its own row's right-click menu, works over either route.

Selection & audition

Finder-style selection — click, ⌘-click, ⇧-range, a marquee drag, ⌘A, arrow keys. Tiles play the instant you press down (hovering pre-decodes the file, so the click itself is near-instant — the status bar shows measured trigger latency). Beds audition loudness-matched at a fixed −32 dBFS RMS reference, starting at a random point in the file; action sounds play at their natural level, starting right at the transient with a 10 ms pre-roll. Space repeats the last tile, Esc or a click elsewhere stops it. ⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z undo and redo every library edit.

Spot to a range of tracks

A category, a subcategory, a Sampler kit, the Pegboard, and a single tile can each be bound to an ordered list of tracks — not just one — via Spot to Track…. A subcategory inherits its parent's list until it gets its own. Which list applies follows the same order as before: the tile's own, else the Pegboard's (if spotted from there), else the category's, else whatever track is selected in Pro Tools right now.

Two ways to reach Pro Tools

Settings ▸ Pro Tools ▸ Spot using switches the route, independently of whichever transport protocol drives Play/Stop/Rec: Pro Tools Scripting names the track and time directly and skips a bound track that already has a clip at the cursor — it also converts a file at a different sample rate, handles files Pro Tools splits into L/R, and re-spots a file that's already in the session. It falls back to Legacy automatically whenever the Scripting link isn't connected, or the connected Pro Tools is older than 2025.6. A bound sound spotted while the link is down lands on the selected track, and the status line says its binding was ignored. When a sound is bound to a mix of mono and stereo tracks, it only takes a track of its own width as long as one is bound. Legacy Spot API is the same Apple Event Soundly and Soundminer use: select the first free bound track, then spot at the cursor.

Spot at the loudest hit

A door, a gunshot, an impact — set a category's Spot Clip At to Loudest Hit (right-click the category; Start is the default) and every sound in it spots with its loudest transient on the cursor instead of its first sample. Override any single tile the same way from its own right-click menu, under Spot At. The hit is found automatically; in Stack view, an orange marker on the waveform shows exactly where — drag it to move it, and a reset button returns it to the detected point once you have. On the Scripting route, the spotted clip also carries Pro Tools' own sync point at that spot, so Pro Tools' own Spot dialog and Grid can reuse it later.

A clip group carries its own sync point when one was set inside Pro Tools itself. A group tile with one spots its bounce at that point automatically — unless its category (or the tile itself) is set to Start, and a marker you've dragged by hand in Pegbox always wins over the group's own.

Pegboard

A pinboard of references — sounds and Sampler kits — that behaves like any other category: drag to reorder, audition, spot, right-click. Pin to Pegboard (or Pin N to Pegboard for a selection) pins a reference; unpinning, or even deleting the original sound, never touches the other. Bind the whole board to a track with Spot to Track… on the board itself, and anything spotted from it inherits that binding unless the tile has its own. Clear Pegboard empties the board only — the sounds stay exactly where they were.

Icons

Every tile can carry an AI-generated picture. Choose a look per category — Realistic (a photoreal image built from the file's name), flat Action icons, or plain color Pads — or override it per tile with your own prompt. Regenerate one tile, or an entire selection at once; a batch regenerate shows the cost before it spends anything. Pick the image provider in Settings ▸ Workspace: OpenAI GPT Image Mini (~$0.005/icon) or Google Gemini (~$0.04/icon) — both bring-your-own-key. A tile with no picture yet shows its file name instead of sitting blank, even in a category with tile names turned off — and Regenerate Icon (the plain, non-AI redraw) now covers those iconless audio tiles too, single or across a selection.

Watched folders

Link a category to a Finder folder and Pegbox mirrors new files, moves, and renames into it automatically — it never deletes anything on your side. This is separate from the Transcribe tab's watch folder, which lives in Settings ▸ Folders.

Backups & recovery

Pegbox snapshots your library on its own — once the first time it holds real data, then hourly, and again right before anything that touches a lot of files at once (a folder import, a sync, a relink pass). Ten snapshots are kept. File ▸ Back Up Now (⌘⇧B) forces one, with icons, any time. Each library keeps its snapshots in its own folder, named for the library's ID, under ~/Library/Application Support/Pegbox/Backups; File ▸ Reveal Backups Folder opens the one for the library that's open.

Category context menu

Right-click a category (or a multi-selection of them) in the sidebar. Every command works on the whole selection at once where that makes sense — the label switches to “for N” to say so.

Tile context menu

Right-click a tile — or a multi-selection — for this menu. Icon and Sampler actions are batch-aware; spotting, relinking, and clipboard actions only appear for a single tile, since they don't make sense for several at once.

Stem context menu

Right-click one stem's row under a stem-set cue for this menu instead.

Build as many kits as you like; every kit is exactly 16 pads in a 4×4 grid, sized so all of them are always visible — the pad grid never scrolls. Click a kit in the sidebar to open it, double-click to rename, right-click for Duplicate, Pin to Pegboard, Spot to Track…, Generate Pad Pictures…, reorder, or Delete Kit.

Playback per pad

Random never repeats the same slice twice in a row. Round Robin cycles slices in order. One Shot plays the whole file start to finish — tap again to stop it early. Choke cuts a pad's own previous hit the instant it's struck again; Boost applies automatic makeup gain (up to +30 dB) to bring a quiet sample's peak up to −1 dBFS, shown live as it's applied.

Triggering

Keyboard: Z X C V / A S D F / Q W E R / 1 2 3 4 map to pads 1–16, active only while the Sampler tab is open. The transport keys match Pro Tools: Space stops a take that's recording or playing — otherwise it plays the last take, or rolls Pro Tools when nothing's been recorded yet; numeric-keypad 3 starts and stops recording; Esc silences every pad at once. Mouse press-to-play, iPad touch, and any MIDI controller all work at the same time — the Sampler is 16-voice polyphonic. Turn on MIDI Learn in Settings ▸ Sampler, and it arms a pad; the next note you play assigns it and auto-advances to the next pad, finishing itself after all 16.

Recording a take

Record with an optional Pro-Tools-synced pre-roll (via PTSL), so you can perform to picture with Pro Tools' own transport rolling under you. Without PTSL connected, it records straight from the cursor and warns you. Takes cap at 300 seconds and only the most recent one is kept on disk; a stereo take that turns out to be identical on both channels folds to mono automatically. Spot Take works even mid-recording — it stops the recorder, waits for you to pick a track, then spots.

Pegbox Remote (iPad)

Requirements: an iPad — Pegbox Remote is iPad-only — running iPadOS 17 or later, on the same network as the Mac, and a licensed copy of Pegbox on the Mac (see Licensing); an unlicensed Mac turns the iPad away and the iPad says why. Getting it: Pegbox Remote comes from the App Store — [App Store link].

Finds the Mac automatically over Wi-Fi — Bonjour, zero setup, nothing to type. It mirrors the same categories, tiles, and icons as Workspace (grid/stack/list, search, favorites): tap a tile to audition it through the Mac's own output, tap SPOT to send it to the Pro Tools cursor, double-tap to rename, tag, favorite, or regenerate its icon. The Sampler comes along too — kits on the left, the same 4×4 pads, touch-down triggers, and a Stop All. Latency is tuned for auditioning and scene-Foley performance; for music-tight timing, a wired MIDI pad still wins.

Pair it once — the first connection asks you to confirm the pairing — then manage paired iPads from Settings ▸ Remote, which also shows this Mac's Bonjour name and lets you Forget a device.

CLI & SoundFlow

A small command-line entry point (--spot, --list) forwards spot requests into the already-running app by stable slot ID, so macro tools like SoundFlow or Keyboard Maestro can trigger a specific library sound without opening Pegbox at all.

Getting your ElevenLabs API key

This — and Voice Generator, Voice Isolator, and Transcribe — needs your own ElevenLabs key. These are the exact steps from Help ▸ Pegbox Help in the app — open that menu any time you need them again.

Type a prompt — Return submits, ⇧Return starts a new line — and press Generate (⌘↩). Takes land under "Pick the Takes to Keep" as their own filled-waveform cards as soon as each finishes, with Play, ✕ to discard that one, and Keep; Discard all clears every take at once.

Keep conforms the take to 48 kHz / 24-bit: non-looped takes fold to mono, looped takes stay stereo so they tile cleanly. It's named from a four-word slug of your prompt and added to a searchable history capped at 200 takes. From that history you can drag any row straight onto a Pro Tools track or into Finder, spot it, show it in Finder, toggle MONO on a stereo file, or remove the row — the file on disk is untouched either way.

Sliders: Stability, Similarity, Style (0–1), plus a Speaker Boost toggle. Takes runs 1–4; the button reads Generate or Re-voice depending on which mode is active. Kept takes conform to 48 kHz / 24-bit and are named from the voice plus a four-word slug of your text, with any audio tags stripped from the filename.

Drop one file, or several — the Isolator queues them one at a time with an “N of M” progress strip, and Cancel drops the rest of the queue with it. Accepts MP3, WAV, AIFF, M4A, or a video file (the audio track is pulled automatically). The result is conformed to 48 kHz / 24-bit and named from a five-word slug of the source filename.

Drop a file — it queues behind a running job the same way the Isolator does. Toggle Label Speakers on for diarization; each detected speaker gets a colored chip you can click to rename in place. Playback follows along underneath the transcript: click any word to seek there, and the current word highlights as it plays.

Words are grouped into speaker turns, each stamped with a start and end timecode. Short backchannels — “mmhm,” “right,” an elongated “uhhh” — fold quietly into the surrounding turn whenever the same speaker talks on both sides of them, so a genuine short reply never gets swallowed by mistake. ⌘= / ⌘- zoom the transcript type. A .txt transcript saves alongside the audio automatically; Copy and Show in Finder appear once one exists.

Add, rename, or remove accounts in Settings ▸ Accounts (you can't remove your last one). Both role switches only appear once a second account exists. Switching the Generation account refetches the Voice tab's voice list, since voices belong to the account that made them.

Accounts

Covered in full under Working Across Multiple Accounts — your ElevenLabs accounts, and which one Generation and Transcription each use.

Folders

Audio

Sampler

Pro Tools transport

Workspace

Remote

About

Version number, a link to the Pegbox website, and a support email link.

Add any Audio Unit, reorder the chain, open each plug-in's own window, bypass one at a time or the whole chain, and save the chain as a named preset via the picker at the top (shown here as "Closed Window"). Workspace auditions play through it live. Spotting bakes it into the file written into your session — the filename and clip name carry the preset's name plus a hash of its settings, so a re-dialed EQ is never confused with an old render. Action-sound categories always spot dry, chain active or not. Plug-ins run out of process, so a crash in one can't take Pegbox down with it.

When something goes wrong

• A permissions error on Spot opens straight to System Settings ▸ Privacy ▸ Automation — approve Pegbox there and try again.
• Spot can't reach Pro Tools. Spotting needs Pro Tools running with a session open. Without one Pegbox still works: drag any tile straight into Pro Tools, another editor, or the Finder. If a session is open and spotting still fails, Settings ▸ Pro Tools has a status light for the Scripting link, the session name it found, and a Reconnect button. Pro Tools older than 2025.6 has no Scripting spot commands at all, so every spot goes out through the Legacy Spot API instead — that route is the one that needs the Automation permission above.
• A tile showing offline just needs relinking: right-click it and choose Relink File…, or run Relink Offline Files for a whole pass — Pegbox uses Spotlight to find files that moved.