I made some notes, mostly from the last Ludum Dare, LD30.

I am posting them in case they happen to help me, or anyone else, this time around!

1. Make sure your music-creation tool of choice works a few days before the jam.  I probably wasted an hour or two getting everything figured out with Music Creator 6 / Sonar X3 last time.
2. If possible, break your game idea into individual feature sets.   This way if you only have time to finish a few features, or one stage of the game, it can still be a complete, though small, game.
3. Think about whether certain assets can be used in multiple places to save time.  Maybe a background, obstacle, or sound effect from one level can be used in another!
4. I used master volume = 22 on my computer to balance sounds.
5. To amplify my voiceover recording to a reasonable level, I used 10dB gain in Audacity.
6. On my system, Sonar X3 will not use the best low-latency settings with the WDM/KS driver mode unless I close other audio applications first.  This even includes Firefox.  After I launch Sonar X3 I can then relaunch web browers, but I cannot play sound with other applications until quitting Sonar X3.
7. In Sonar X3, occasionally the sound would get raspy like it is clipping or the latency is too low.  Choosing a higher latency may help, but there seems to be a better solution:  Pressing play, then stop in the controls at the top seems to usually fix this.
8. A game that is too easy is probably better than a game that is too hard.  People can see a whole game if it is easy enough, and with thousands of games, odds of someone playing all the way through are small otherwise.
9. For flash games, add some space above the flash object on the HTML page so it is not jammed next to the title bar.