Prepare a project in your DAW using the project checklist fromthe material as your guidelines.

I'm Roope Anttinen and I'm using Logic Express 9 as my DAW and here's a guide, how to prepare aproject to comply with the recommended settings of the Berklee Introduction to Music Production course.

Create a new project

I use an Empty Project template as a starting point now. Actually in my own work I don't use that anymore because I've made my own custom template which already has the settings done and has multiple tracks ready and prepared as I like :)

You can leave the default settings here and go on.

This window is shown after the Empty Project button is pressed. The default template has one audiotrack.

Then go to Preferences → Audio

After the empty project is created, navigate through the menus to Logics audio settings.

Which looks like this...

In this window you configure the output and input devices. Usually both are set to be your audio interface. For my own reasons I use the builtin sound card as the output device.

Audio buffer size is set here also. 128 samples is a good setting for minimal latency. You might have to increase it later if you CPU is struggling to play the project.

Also the recording bit depth is set here. Check the 24-bit Recording box if it's not already checked.

Then in the 'General' Tab...

Then in the same window, change to the 'General' tab. There you can set the recording file format. Broadcast wave (BWF) and AIFF are good options. If you plan to have very big one shot recordings, then consider using Core Audio Format (CAF). WAVE and AIFF are limited to 4GB file size, which means in time about 15 minutes. CAF doesn't have that limitation.

The go to Project Settings → Audio

After Logics own settings are done, it's time to check the project settings. Navigate to projects audiosettings.

Where you can...

Here the recording sample rate is configured. 48 kHz is suitable for production the phase. First: It might sound better for a person with golden ears but is also uses less CPU power. Why? Because most sound cards and of course the audio interface might operate internally at 48 kHz sampling rate– so if you use 44.1 kHz in you project the audio needs to be resampled to the proper sample rate for output and that eats some precious CPU cycles.

Digital video also uses 48 kHz sample rate for the audio tracks so it's more convenient to have it all at the same rate if your work is going to be used in a video.

When all is set...

Now it's the time to save the project to a location you can find it later. It's good to save the project before doing any real work because if the DAW crashes it can't make a panic save if the project haven't been saved before and you lost all your hard work.

At a suitable place in your hard drive..

I have created a 'Logic' folder on my hard drive and I save all my projects in there on their own subfolders. Give the project a good descriptive name at the 'Save As' input and hit Save-button.

Now when using Logics 'File – Open' you can go the Logic folder and find a new subfolder with thename you gave the project and inside it there's the project file.

Eventually there will be much more files and folders inside the projects folder but the project file is the one you'll open with Logic.

If Logic happened to crash then the panic save can be found from the same location with a otherwise same name but (crashed) added to the end of the filename. Open that and you are back at the moment the crash happened.

Conclusion

With Logic 9 the order to do the project checklist is

1. Create a new project

2. Configure the audio device, buffer size and bit depth at the Logics audio settings.

3. Configure the recording file format at Logics general settings

4. Configure the recording sample rate at Projects audio settings

5. Save the project with a descriptive name to a place you can later find it

Cheers!

Roope Anttinen