OK, have spent last hour trying to get XP to recognize a USB - Midi connected keyboard (Yamaha PSR-195 (it was cheap, OK?)).
The Yamaha driver I found under yamaha/keyboards/whatever says “no device”
The Yamaha driver I found under “Professional Audio Products” tells me my 1.something Ghz processor (this is a Dell laptop purchased new in 2009) is not adequate to run the program.
I can click a midi file and it will play just fine on the keyboard, so there is some level of awareness of it.
Under Control Panel/Add Hardware, there is a yellow question mark beside something it calls “Audio Device on High-Definition Audio Bus” - but cannot find a driver.
I found a freeware “midi driver for keyboards” (Midi-Mate V1.004) freeware and downloaded it - it also wants me to connect the device that is connected and turned on.
(and Audacity won’t play a midi, even with LAME and LADSPA plug-ins installed.)
That is because neither LAME nor LADSPA have anything to do with MIDI at all.
LAME is a plugin used for encoding audio to MP3, LADSPA plugins are audio processing plugins that operate on an audio stream and return modified audio. DSSI plugins are LADSPA style instrument plugins, which take MIDI data and generate an audio stream as output.
Checking the Audacity website - it looks like MIDI support is patchy and while you can import MIDI files into a project I am not sure you can do anything with them yet - not even play them.
Right, working from the beginning…
We need to know what you wish to achieve …
You have a USB/MIDI keyboard, plugged in to your laptop. You can either use this keyboard as a MIDI target (MIDI Out) to render MIDI data as audio. You could also use the keyboard as a MIDI source (MIDI In) to capture performance data into a MIDI recording app, control virtual instruments, etc.
You say that you can play a MIDI file on the keyboard (using Windows Media Player or similar). Are you sure the file is playing on the keyboard (can you control the volume of the playback on the keyboard?). If this is the case then you should be able to check the Control Panel/Sounds/Audio to look at the MIDI Music playback default device. Normally this is Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth - a crappy MS supplied software wavetable synth. This is the device used by Media Player to play MIDI files. It looks like this may actually be working (your keyboard when plugged in changes the default MIDI output and this works.
To check for MIDI input capability, get something like Anvil Studio or the demo version of Cockos Reaper - both of these are good Audio/MIDI studios. In either of them, you have to configure the MIDI input source, and if your keyboard is working you should see it there.
You don’t say anything about what software you’re trying to use the keyboard with, which makes me think maybe you’re expecting to just plug it in and be able to play. It doesn’t quite work that way. You’ll need to be running a program with soft synths – there are lots of them, some free, some cheap and some expensive. Reaper, which si_blakely mentioned, is one that is good, inexpensive, and has a pretty liberal free trial. (It’s not crippled, you just have to wait through a nag screen.) If you’ve never used a DAW before it will be confusing, but once you figure out how to set up a virtual instrument it’s not too hard.
I didn’t expect it to be Plug & Play (I go back to the days of Win 3.1 and manually setting IRQ’s) - but I did expect Yamaha’s driver to find it and not tell me “No device, when come back, bring device”, which it is doing.
The “sound and audio devices” show a single item (Sigma Tel Audio). The hardware list has about a dozen entries, none of which say Yamaha. There are several codecs; I don’'t know which is what or their function.
I suspect it is windows something which is playing the midi - yes, it is on the keyboard - the volume control confirms that.
Looks like I won’t be coming back as a digital audio engineer after all…
How on earth did you guess that I’d never heard of a “DAW” until 2 weeks ago?
I just re-checked Audacity - under “import” it lists MIDI - will not play it, but whatever - and the only source hardware it knows is the Sigma Tel device (I’m guessing the on-board audio card.
Will see what Reaper can do (besides load this poor machine up with more stuff I’ll never figure out how to use.
The only driver you should need is the one for the cable itself. After that, as everyone else says, you need software. It sounds like you already have that driver set up, or else you wouldn’t be able to have software that plays music through your keyboard.
Other scenarios have already been covered above, so I’ll just cover one. If you want to compose music, like on a staff or something, you’ll just need composer software. Finale Notepad 2012 is free and easy to use. Musescore is also free, and more fully featured, but a little harder to use. In either one, you play the note and that note appears on the sheet music. Musescore will even let you record a piece of music and convert it.
Both come with a Softsynth, but each is designed or configured only for playing back music from the sheet music, and not for playing what you play on your keyboard.
Well, got REAPER - haven’t gotten it to record, and all it sees is “USB Midi Device” - gawd, what a chunk of software.
I am/was a serious photographer (anybody in central CA want approx 1,000 lbs of darkroom gear?)
so I was familiar with darkroom image manipulation - still haven’t come close to using more than 10% of Photoshop.
This gear… It’ll take me 60 days to even look at half of it.
So, the USB MIDI device you are seeing is your USB-MIDI cable.
You should have MIDI-Out and MIDI-In connectors on your keyboard, connected to your MIDI-in and MIDI-out connectors on the USB cable.
The next thing you have to do is configure the keyboard. As I recall from my old PSR, you need to tell the keyboard not to send midi data from the keys directly to the inbuild midi module, but to send it to the (PSR)MIDI-out. The manual should tell you how to do that.
Get a tool called MidiOx - you can connect it to your laptop MIDI-in and then see if you are getting MIDI data. The website looks like crap and does not seem to work properly, but the tool itself does.
I have the cable plugged into the PSR - my eyes aren’t so good (or my arms, spine, kidneys… ), so I may have crossed in and out.
I downloaded the manual, but have not printed all of it - will give it another shot later.
Well, MidiOx says “nothing here - call me when you’ve got a midi”.
It was a cute thought, but if I ever again want to play digital engineer, I’ll try building something specific for the task (and get a slightly higher grade instrument.
This thing “shows you the msic a it playsit, so you can play along” - it shows a single note on some very fast moving music - the effect is 7 lines with a Clef varying between bass and Treble, and a blur of a single dot running up and down the lines - BIG help. Yes, I know there’s a way to slow it down, but, by the time you slow it down to the point a beginner could keep up, the melody will be unrecognizable - might as well just run the scales.
Oh - one last thing - the cable I use is USB-powered with a small box with “USB MIDI” at the junction of the USB cord and the MIDI cords. The 3 LEDs read Red Green Green (the red one is onve the word “USB” - if that helps.
Also - I was surprised that the vocal track made no effort to play - can vocals not be encoded, or is it a limitation of the keyboard that it cannot reconstruct sounds to the speakers?
Oh - connecting a keyboard’s earphone jack to your home stereo/theater/whatever “Aux” (or “Tape In” or “CD”) will allow the keyboard to play over the house system. I’m amazed how many people don’t realize that an analog audio signal is an analog audio signal.
Are there any designed-for-the-home devices which have any kind of conflict?
So at the moment, your problem is the driver for the USB-MIDI cable - you need to look at that to start with, it should have come with a driver disk or download. Check in device manager under USB for yellow questionmarks, too. Also, maybe try a USB hub - it is possible that the laptop USB ports cannot supply enough current for the adapter (unlikely, as it is just a couple of usb connected serial uarts and opto-isolators.
Get that sorted first.
As for your question regarding vocal tracks, I don’t understand what you are trying to do. Please explain, telling me the software you are using, the type of file you are loading, etc. Detail is good. But just to clarify - MIDI files have no vocal tracks - vocal data is audio (WAV) - MIDI data is just note data sent to an instrument (it may be multi-instrument device, though). There is no MIDI instrument for the human voice (there are some choral Ahs and Oos, but they are not true vocals). And before I get hassled, there are some virtual voice instruments, but they are not true MIDI instruments, as they require additional voicing information.
Well, we have something new - the 3 leds now show blinking red, solid yellow, and solid green.
I bought 2 of these, thinking they were different designs (for $7, I don’t expect much). Control Panel/Sounds and Audio Devices now has an entry for “USB Audio Device/Sound, game, and Video Controller” Doubling clicking 2x more times gets an entry of “WDM MIDI Device” - nothing about driver at this level, ust “use its features” or “do not use its features”
If “WDM” can be iterpreted as including hardware, thi sseems to ne as fay as it is going toward recognizing the keyboard (yes, keyboard is powered on and connected to USB while booting.
And MidiOX gets me a win 3.1 window with command prompt + a dozen click-for-menu icons across the top - it has entries for two Yamaha devices. and mentions our old friend USB midi device.
I’ll read the help sometime.
I have never had this much trouble installing anything PC related.
I was half-expecting midi to be able to digitize voice - if VOIP can do it, why doesn’t midi?
My play-with-it file is 1932’s Teddy Bear’s Picnic and it really is disappointing not to have the vocal track - it is over half of the fun of the piece.
Maybe in another month, but I really should be learning how to play it instead of tinkering wirh hardware (which I will also never learn).
MIDI doesn’t carry sound in any way, shape, or form. Instead, it sends commands from one device to another. Most of the commands will be along the line of “turn note N on at velocity V” or “turn note N off”. It basically tells the synth to behave as if you had pressed a certain key or removed your finger from the key. The sound you get is produced by the synth and has little to do with the MIDI file. It is possible, however for software to use keys pressed on a keyboard connected to the computer to trigger digitized audio. Pressing middle c, for instance, instead of playing the note “c” could start playing an audio file and pressing a different key could stop the playback. In that case the audio would come from your computer. (To confuse things a little more, with your keyboard you would probably hear the note coming from your synth and the audio file from your computer.)
Well, some change (I hesitate to use the word “progress”).
Upon booting (with keyboard off). I got the “new hardware found” dialog - it went nowhere, of course, but the leds on the box on the cable now read (off), green, green - they were red, yellow, green last night.
Maybe the PC and the keyboard are quietly finding a common language behind my back.
Yea, I again tried to set up the yamaha midi driver - it still couldn’t find anything.
You need to find the driver for the USB-MIDI cable - that is the only thing you need to get set up and working (and you did have that going, a few posts back, called WDM MIDI interface or some such). Once that is going, that is all you need.
MIDI is stupid, and not plug-n-play in the way you expect. It cannot identify what is on the end of a MIDI cable, or even if it is connected - but MIDI commands just work, for the most part, if things are plugged in.
So sort out your USB-MIDI cable, to the point where MIDIOX sees an interface, then plug in your keyboard and try again. You don’t need to install anything more drivers at that point, nothing with Yamaha in the name because MIDI does not know about your Yamaha keyboard - if it can talk it will work, to a first approximation, anyhow.
And find a beginners book on MIDI, so you actually figure out how it works - you are making assumptions based on how modern systems work that don’t apply to a protocol invented in 1981, but is still useful.
What MIDI-to-USB box do you have?
What do those lights correspond to?
How is your MIDI connected (OUT goes to IN, and IN goes to OUT from the keyboard to the box)?
If it’s playing MIDI files on the keyboard from a file on the computer, it sounds to me like it’s recognized in some way. What software are you trying to play your keyboard on? Or, more generally, how are you expecting to use your Yamaha keyboard with your Windows computer?
Also, do this and tell me what happens (I had to look this up, as it’s been years since I’ve used XP):
Click the Start menu, right-click My Computer, and choose Properties from the pop-up. In Properties, click the Hardware tab and choose Device manager. On Sound, Video, and Game Controllers, click the “+” to expand. Do you see your MIDI interface there listed by name? If so, is there a “!” or “?” by it?
I don’t have a “box” I have a cable (2 actually, which appear identical).
One arrived bare-bones, the other with “instructions” which look like something you’d find in a (modern) Jack-in-the-Box package.
I don’t know if the one I installed is the one with the instructions or not.
There is a plastic box inline (about the size and shape of the little rocker switches you used to find on cheap small appliances. According to the instruction, I was to connect the cable, open my “music program” (suggesting Cubase or Sonar as examples) and define the cable as my midi device, then connect the instrument.
The driver is in the little box with the LED’s - it is billed as “USB powered”.
Um, right.
It tells me the leds correspond to Power, Midi In and Midi Out.
I have an old amp in here I used to play CDs, using the laptop as the CD player.
It had a scratchy channel, so I found an old receiver for $10 and decided to run the laptop’s headphone jack into it to test it.
Now Windows Media Player won’t work.
I unplugged the midi cable, which got me more grief, still no sound. Ended up plugging the keyboard in as a test device.
The reciever works - there are no music stations in the Hell Hole of a town to which I care to listen, but it works.
Now for a $5 CD player to replace the laptop for that function.
Under sounds and audio devices it has Sigma Tel as a Midi device. Sigma tel was what screamed when I disconnected the cable, so I’m guessing it is the driver in the little box.
I plugged the cable back in, the lights are now green (power, I’m guessing) the millde if a faint yellow, and the last is flashing red.
I was just wanting to see if I could capture sound and play at audio engineering.
I have downloaded MIDI-OX, Audacity, and Reaper, all toward that simple end (Reaper is so far past my comprehension it’s pathetic) - still nowhere.
I got about 2 hours of sleep last night and saw the nice dentist at 13:30 (which is when I am usually asleep.
), so I may have crossed in and out.