Set up your DAW

Logic Pro

Jude speaks the Mackie Control Universal protocol and works with Logic's built-in Mackie Control support — no hardware, nothing to install. Jude publishes its control surfaces over virtual MIDI, and Logic finds them on its own. Setup is two minutes, once.

1. Pick Logic Pro in Jude

Open Settings → DAW and choose Logic Pro. Then set Number of channels — 16, 24, 32, or 64. Pick a size that covers the biggest project you work on; each track in your project needs a channel for Jude to see it live. 32 is the default and a comfortable middle.

Changing the channel count later is fine. To Logic it looks like the control surfaces were unplugged and plugged back in, so expect the connection to blink and re-establish.

2. Let Logic find it

With Jude running, open Logic. Logic detects the surfaces automatically and installs them by itself. If Logic was already open when you set Jude up, make it look again: Logic Pro → Control Surfaces → Rescan All Models…

3. Check the order — once

Open Logic Pro → Control Surfaces → Setup. You'll see one device icon per group of eight channels. Reading left to right, they should be Jude MCU 01-08, Jude MCU 09-16, and so on. If any icon is out of order, drag it into place. Logic remembers the arrangement from then on.

Used an earlier version of Jude that appeared as a single device called Project Jude? Delete that device in Control Surfaces → Setup first, then rescan — otherwise Logic keeps talking to a surface that's no longer there.

Good to know in Logic

  • One armed track per input. Logic allows only one record-armed track per shared audio input — arming a track can silently disarm another that uses the same input. That's Logic's rule, not Jude's; give tracks their own inputs when you want several armed at once.
  • Solo is not mute. When something is soloed, the other tracks go quiet without their mute lights coming on. Ask the engineer to "clear the solos" and everything returns.
  • Track groups gang together. If your tracks are grouped in Logic, arming, muting, or soloing one member moves the whole group — same as it would from any control surface.
  • Take Folders. Turn on Take Folders for overlapping recordings (a Logic project setting) so repeated takes stack instead of replacing each other.
  • Markers and arrangement sections. Jude reads, adds, names and removes markers through Logic's Marker list, which it opens for a moment and puts back the way it was. Arrangement sections count as markers too; Jude reads them from your saved project (Logic's autosave counts), and you add and remove them in Logic.
  • Hands off for a moment. Some things Jude does in Logic work the way VoiceOver does: moving a track brings the window to the front for a moment, and renaming or selecting a track, or adding a marker, borrows the keyboard for a moment. If you type or move the mouse during that moment, the change may not go through. The engineer will tell you when that happens, and asking again fixes it.

If commands seem to land on the wrong tracks, the surface order from step 3 is almost always the reason — see Troubleshooting.

Next: Talking to Jude — what to say, and what the engineer can do for you.