Korg Forums

[Francois]

Tonight, it took me a while to figure out how to make the USB driver work, so I thought I could share my experience in case it might help somebody who's experiencing the same difficulties I faced with two different machines.

This is valid only for XP, which is what I use for my music activities. One is your standard Core Duo 2 PC and the other is a Fujitsu 12" ST tablet.

- So I downloaded the latest driver from korg.com to make sure I would be installing the latest version, always a good idea to check that. It installed without a hitch, or at least, apparently so.

- I opened the SQ Editor, but no connection would work. So I opened the Control Panel and the Sound/Audio panel to check the tab Audio. There was a KRONOS drive appearing for Audio and Recording, but nothing under the MIDI field.

- I closed the Sound panel and opened the System panel and Hardware tab to check the Device Manager. There was no yellow question mark, meaning no device apparently not working. I clicked on Sound, Video and Game controllers to display the content, and I could see a KORG KRONOS driver installed. I clicked on that driver to open its properties page. There, I clicked on the tab Properties. It shows a little icon saying MIDI Devices and Instruments. Click on this and it will show KORG USB-MIDI Driver for Windows. Select it and click on the button Properties bottom right. There, I had a windows displaying the following message:

"Driver is enabled but not functioning properly".

When all is working properly, it should says "Driver is enabled and functioning properly".

So I had found the source of the problem. Now to fix it.

- I started the "Uninstall Korg USB-MIDI device app" that is installed with the driver. After clicking on Next, it will show you all the MIDI drivers installed on your system. I could see the KRONOS driver on mid9 and mid10.

- At this point, I thought it should work since we know Windows can cope with up to 10 MIDI drivers. But clearly, the KRONOS driver was not working so I decided to tidy up a bit and remove not only the Korg driver, but others as well. If you click on Option, you can deselect "Delete Korg MIDI device only", which will enable you to uninstall otehr MIDI drivers as well.

- Before continuing on my story, I should point out that I realised something I had not paid attention to until now. Amongst the MIDI drivers installed, I also had a universal USB Audio for the Solaris, two for soundcards (one for the motherboard chip and another for the soundcard, as well as three for the X-Station I use as my portable controller. Clearly, one should be enough. So why three ? My guess is that I have never paid attention to where I plug it, and so everytime I plug it to a different USB port, this has the effect of reinstalling the driver. I had noticed that, but never realised that it had the effect of adding a USB driver as opposed to reallocating the one already installed !

- Moving along, I uninstalled both KRONOS mid9 and mid10 drivers as well as two of the X-Station drivers and restarted my PC.

- After reboot, I installed the USB Driver once more, started the Kronos, connected the USB cable. The device was recognised and Windows installed USB Composite Device and USB Audio Device. And this time, it worked fine. When starting teh Editor, communication was instant and the transfer of data happened. Here, I was surprised as I thought it was quite fast to transfer all data, including sequences.

- Checking the control panels again to see what was what, I could see two KRONOS drivers installed, one saying "Standard Driver [KRONOS] <Connected> and anotehr saying KORG KRONOS <Connected>.

All was well with the main PC. And now for the Tablet.

- Again, installation without a glitch, but no communication between the Editor and teh Kronos. Obviously, I had an idea as to what was happening. But when I checked following the same procedure as above, I could see that I only had three MIDI drivers. One was the onboard sound card, two were an old Yamaha SoftSynth installed on the tablet to hear GM MIFI files.

- This time, although the Yamaha SoftSynth was working perfectly well and had never given me any cause for complaint, the Korg Uninstall utility was showing those two drivers as Corrupted. So I removed the KRONOS drivers and both Yamaha drivers and reinstalled the Korg driver after reboot. This time, it worked fine. The KRONOS drivers appear as mid0 and mid1. Funny thing is, I reinstalled the Yamaha SoftSynth once the KRONOS could communicate with its Editor, and it all works. I can access teh SoftSynth to play MIDI files and I can use teh Editor with the Kronos.

So the upshot of all this is that I'm not surprised some people are reporting problems getting the Editor to work with their KRONOS. For somebody who has no idea where to look and what to do about it, getting the Korg USB driver to work can be an impossible task. On top of that, because the USB installation reports no error, even when the MIDI driver is not working, you would be forgiven to thinkn that everything is OK when clearly it is not.

Finally, for all those who complain about the Editor not working or is sluggish, check the USB driver first. If you read "Driver is enabled but not functioning properly", you know what to do !

Careful, I don't pretend here to give you THE answer that will fix all of your driver woes, but it's a start and something to check in case of a problem.

[xmlguy]

[Francois]

Good point. Should port 9 have worked ? Perhaps those two ports are required, so with port10 not working, port9 was not enough ?

And with the tablet, I only had mid0 to mid3 used, so it should have worked first time of asking but didn't. This time, it was another kind of problem.

Hopefully, the post above can help somebody out if faced with the same problem.

[xmlguy]

Editors will need both midi ports because midi events and commands have result codes to ensure that they were received, recognized, and executed without errors. Midi really is a bidirectional protocol at the logical layer, even though hardware midi is unidirectional at the physical layer. Midi running over USB still uses two unidirectional ports to maintain software interface compatibility, even though USB is a much faster bidirectional physical serial bus.

I agree that your post may be helpful for people experiencing similar problems. This really is fundamental problem with Windows, as well as the Korg driver. Microsoft should provide a midi interface configuration control panel, and any limit of under 100 midi ports is rather silly. Modern PCs are fast enough to handle hundreds of midi connections, whether over USB or not. Midi configuration should be automatic, like PCI, but it is still in the 80s stage of manual configuration instead of automatic port negotiation. All of the music gear manufacturers should get together to make a new midi2012 standard that includes autoconfiguration, along with support for autodiscovery of common keyboard architectures, like banks, programs, and manufacturer specific modes, instead of depending entirely on proprietary sysex commands.

[Francois]

[Sparker]

[StephenKay]