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I have several MIDI devices, a Korg PadKontrol, Korg MicroKontrol, and Edirol 61 key MIDI keyboard. All great devices, but getting them up and running with Windows and then with your software of choice is NO easy task. Actually downright frustrating at times, and most users would probably just return the device and give up.
Well, I came across a problem that took me hours to solve and I had to search all over the web for the solution and finally found it. Hopefully, this article will help you if you are in a similar situation as I was. The problem I had was Windows would simply not see my device. I could unplug and plug it in and it would act as though it found it and it installed the drivers but the device would not show up in my Reason 4 software. I was a bit confused, as I could see it in the device manager but it was nowhere to be found in Reason under the midi controller. I have never seen this problem before, and had no idea how to resolve it.
What happened was that the midi ports in windows were all used up by trying to switch between USB ports and installing different drivers to get the devices to work. You have to remember this important piece of information, windows treats every USB device as its own. So when you plug in a device to let’s say the left USB port, it will ask you to install the drivers for your MIDI device. If you unplug it and plug it back into the right USB port, windows will ask you for the drivers again, usually, it knows the device and it has the drivers on the HD so it will automatically pull them and use them. But either way, it’s installing the drivers for that port. So the best advice is to pick a USB slot for your given equipment and ALWAYS use that port, that will just make your life a lot easier. So what happened was that I used up all 10 devices that windows allows, so it couldn’t assign any new MIDI ports and that’s when things really start messing up. The windows OS isn’t intelligent enough to say, ah let’s wipe out some of these assigned MIDI ports to free up the room so we can install this new device this user is so trying to install.
Read this guide on how to free up those 10 USB ports…
In case the above link ever goes dead, you basically want to just open up regedit and navigate to this key:
‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionDrivers32’ and delete the midi1-9 and wave1-9 entries and then reboot and try to add your device again.
Via ‘Start/Run’, the registry editor can be started by typing in ‘regedit’. The relevant entries are in the path ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionDrivers32’ (left part of the window). As can be seen in the picture above, in case of an error all 10 entries for MIDI (midi to midi9) and/or audio (lower end of the list, wave to wave9) have already been created.
I followed the guide linked above and deleted all duplicate registry entries. Restarted and let windows find my Korg padKontrol and everything worked like a charm. Without this guide, I would have never figured it out.