An instrument for your hands.

Hold your hands up to the camera and play. No controller, no excuses.

SAUCE · REMIX

Curve your hands into a C and strings of light stretch between your fingertips. Pluck them to make sounds, or load a song and remix it with hand shapes locked to its beat. Everything runs on your Mac.

New in 2.1: LOOP (Melody mode), three ways to play (CURL · PALM · ONE HAND), MIDI & Ableton, and FoxBox in six languages.

Looking for STUDIO, VISUALS, MASKS or the voice mask? FoxBox 2.0 is the hands instrument only. The full 1.5 toolkit stays available as FoxBox 1.5.5.

🎸 SAUCE: make sounds

FoxBox opens here. No song, no setup, no manual: your first note plays within seconds.

• The pose: both hands curved into a C, turned a little toward the camera, thumbs in front.
• Pick a note by raising or lowering a hand. The notes stay in key, and each hand shows its note.
• Curl a finger to pluck. Faster is louder; keep it curled to hold the note. Two hands play two notes.
• Play your way: CURL (curl a finger), PALM (tap the air with an open palm, like a drum pad) or ONE HAND (everything with either hand). No style is better; pick one in setup or Settings → Playing, and switch any time.
• Twist your wrists to bend, shake for vibrato, and point up or down to change octave.
• Hand shapes add effects: ✊ DRIVE · 🤏 WOBBLE · ✌️ ECHO · 🤘 SPACE.
• Seven sounds: 808, REESE, GROWL and WOBBLE basses, and PLUCK, LEAD and KEYS (keys 1–7). Any key and scale.
• FLOW: your right hand sets the pitch and your left makes the shapes.
• LOOP (Melody mode): S switches PLUCK · FLOW · LOOP. Pick a melody (or 🎲) and it loops on the beat while your hands shape it: right hand up for brighter, left hand for a higher octave, hands apart for space, a fist drops it.
• The loop strip: the melody's notes under the stage. Hover to drag, stretch, add or delete them; whatever you do stays in key.

🎛 REMIX: remix any song

Load a track from your library, drop one on the window, or try the test beat. FoxBox splits it into stems on your Mac and starts two bars before the drop.

• Hold a hand shape and its effect plays, locked to the beat. Let go and the song snaps back in time. ✊ TEAROUT · ✌️ RIDDIM CHOPS · 🤏 WOBBLE · 🤘 HALFTIME · 👇 SUB DROP · ☝️ BUILD ROLL (let go: the drop). Raise your hand for more. Two hands play two effects.
• Fold a finger to cut its band: SUB · LOW · MID · HI-MID · HIGH.
• Stretch the strings for tension, tilt them to slide the 808, and shake them for vibrato.
• Jump between sections (INTRO, BUILD, DROP…). Every jump lands on the bar. No train-wrecks.

🪟 Frames

Hold a frame with your thumbs and index fingers. The last 4 beats loop inside it, picture and sound, for as long as you hold it.

• Wider for more: the frame's size sets how much effect you hear. Let go and it stops.
• Each new frame is the next effect, each with its own sound: ECHO TRAIL, PRISM, HALFTONE, KALEIDO, DATAMOSH and THERMAL.
• In LOOP, a frame puts its effect on the melody, on the beat. F frames from the keyboard, P skips to the next effect.

💿 The library wheel

Hold the shaka 🤙 (or press L) and your music fans up out of the waveform as a dome of record sleeves. Crate-digging, minus the crates.

• Your right index finger is the dial.
• Close your left hand to pull a sleeve out and hear a preview. Hold it to load the track.
• It reads a music folder, a Rekordbox XML export or your Serato library, with search, playlists and crates.

✨ Make it yours

• Board: knobs and faders for the sound (tone, envelope, motion) or the song (stems, bands, master).
• Visuals: Bars, Halo, Silk, Grain or Scope. In SAUCE they play over the camera; in REMIX they wrap around the waveform.
• Edit shapes (in Hands or Beat FX): choose what each hand shape does.
• NOTE PICKING by height or by the space between your hands, and pluck sensitivity (Settings → Playing).
• ONE HAND (Settings → Playing): either hand plays. Hold a shape to switch its effect on or off, hold one L to make a frame, and set the hold time, wobble tolerance and your reach. The GUIDE has a one-handed version, and F (frame), P (the next frame effect) and L (library) work from the keyboard.
• Left-handed layout (Settings → Playing): in FLOW your left hand plays and your right makes the shapes, and the library dial is your left index.
• Record: WAV takes in SAUCE, video with sound in REMIX. Drag them straight into Ableton, Rekordbox or Finder.
• Send to output: the picture full screen on a projector or a stream.
• Face hiding is there if you want it (off by default).
• The GUIDE walks you through every move with your own camera. Press G to replay it.
• Setup and language: five quick questions on the first start (language, face hiding, lead hand, how you play, your music). FoxBox follows your Mac's language: English, Español, and in beta Português (Brasil), Français, Deutsch and 日本語. Change it in Settings → Playing → Language.

🎹 MIDI & Ableton

Your hands play any synth: they're the controller you already own. Everything is in Settings → MIDI & Ableton.

• MIDI out: turn on the "FoxBox" virtual MIDI port and pick it as an input in any DAW or synth app. Plucks send notes; your hands' height, twist and spread and your shapes send CCs (the CC map is in Settings, with Learn for your DAW's MIDI learn).
• FoxBox for Ableton Live: a device that plays your hands into the track it sits on, with four macros (Height, Twist, Spread, Shape) to map to anything in Live. Install puts it in your Live User Library. Needs Live Suite, or Live Standard with Max for Live; with Intro or Lite, use the "FoxBox" port.
• Ableton Link: tempo in sync with Live and other Link apps on your network. It's off by default: turn it on in FoxBox (Settings → MIDI & Ableton) and in Live. LOOP, frames and REMIX follow it.
• MIDI takes: each take also saves a .mid next to the audio. Drag it into your DAW.

What's next

• FoxBox Visuals (coming soon): visuals for your music, live or recorded for content. Start from your camera, a video, a photo or a built-in visualizer: over 50,000 looks that hit on the drop and move with your hands. The roadmap is on foxbox.tech.
• FoxBox Voice (beta): the sibling app. Type a line or record yourself and get a finished vocal, cut to the bar and ready for your DAW. Invite-only for now.

Install

Requires: Apple silicon (M1 or newer) · macOS 14+ · a camera (built in or USB).

1. Download the .dmg from Releases, open it, and drag FoxBox into Applications.
2. First open only: FoxBox isn't notarized by Apple yet, so macOS asks once.
   • macOS 14: right-click FoxBox → Open → Open.
   • macOS 15+: open it once and click Done, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
3. Allow the camera when macOS asks. SAUCE needs no downloads. REMIX downloads the stem splitter (84 MB) the first time you split a song.
4. Updates install at startup: FoxBox checks GitHub Releases, verifies each download's SHA-256, and restarts into the new version. WHAT'S NEW then shows what changed.

Already on 1.5? FoxBox updates itself to 2.0. Your files stay where they are, and 1.5.5 is still on the Releases page.

Privacy: the camera, your hands and your music never leave the Mac. The only network use is the update check (GitHub), the one-time stem splitter download and, if you turn it on, Ableton Link on your local network. The Live device hears FoxBox on this Mac only.

Under the hood

Electron app (React · TypeScript)       camera · updater · drag-out · output window
   ├── hand tracking    MediaPipe hands in a worker · hand shapes · plucks · frames
   ├── strings          three.js / WebGL2 strings, frames, visuals and the library wheel
   ├── SAUCE            Tone.js instruments · melodies · the Board
   ├── REMIX            song deck · beat-locked FX · live stems · the library (folder, Rekordbox XML, Serato)
   └── MIDI & Link      virtual MIDI port · Ableton Link · .mid takes · OSC to the Live device (loopback)
        │  token-authenticated, loopback only
Python engine (FastAPI · uv)            songs · structure and beat analysis · HT-Demucs stems on MLX

Build from source

cd engine && uv sync --all-packages      # Python 3.12
scripts/check.sh all                     # engine tests + app tests
scripts/dev.sh                           # run the app against the local engine

Credits

Designed by SmittyTech

Built on open-source work by many people; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. What you play is yours.

_{GPL-3.0. FoxBox ships mutagen (GPL-2.0-or-later) to read your music's tags and artwork, so the app is GPL-3.0 as a whole. Model weights download at runtime under their own licenses; the stem splitter's weights (Demucs, by Meta) are provided for scientific use only, as FoxBox says before the download.}