Finishing the Autoload Song | Apple Pro Training Series: Logic Pro 7 and Logic Express 7

You're about to save your finished Autoload Song. But first it's important to create enough Audio Objects to get you quickly making music whenever you start a new song. You'll also want to make sure there are a few tracks ready to go in the Arrange window. Let's add three more Audio Track Objects and three more Audio Instrument Objects.

1.	Create three Audio Track Objects and three Audio Instrument Objects (you will have a total of four of each Object).
2.	Name your Objects appropriately, and arrange them in the order shown in the figure below. Don't worry about placing them in exact positions; you'll use a special command in the next step to clean up the Audio layer and align all the Objects.
3.	Press Cmd-A to select all the Objects on the Audio layer.
4.	From the Environment's local menu bar, choose Options > Clean up > Align Objects. The Audio Objects align in a straight row. Now that the Environment looks pretty and organized, let's turn our focus to the Arrange window.
5.	Close the Environment window. In the Arrange window, assign each of the Environment's Audio Objects to its own individual track.
6.	If you so desire, assign icon graphics to each channel. The Autoload Song is done!
7.	Save your Autoload Song (Cmd-S). NOTE If you started this lesson with 12Begin.lso instead of your own Autoload Song from Lesson 4, you'll need to use the Save As option to save your Autoload Song in the User > Library > Application Support > Logic > Song Templates folder on your hard disk. (See the end of Lesson 11 for details.)

Locking the Autoload Song

Cmd-S! Although OS X is incredibly stable, crashes do happen (particularly when USB audio interfaces are accidentally unplugged). To avoid the sadness of seeing creativity disappear, you are well advised to make Cmd-S your friend, and then visit her often.

However, Cmd-S is no friend to your Autoload Song, and it's easy to accidentally Cmd-S unwanted changes into this very important file. To protect your Autoload Song, lock it instead.

In the Finder, navigate to and select your Autoload Song.

TIP

The easy way to do this is to hold down the Command key and click the name of the file at the top of the Autoload.lso Arrange window. The entire path to the file will drop down from the title bar; just move the mouse down to Song Templates and release the button, and the Song Templates folder will open.

Choose File > Get Info (Cmd-I).

An Info window opens.

Select the Locked check box.

Your Autoload Song is now locked and cannot be changed or saved over (if you look closely at the song file, you'll see a little lock attached to its bottom left corner). If you need to change your Autoload Song, you'll have to unlock the song file by deselecting this check box.