Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Connecting Kawai CA 91 to PC via USB/MIDI - how?

I've just connected my CA 91 to a USB port on my wife's laptop (1 year old and also running XP) - same problem, not recognised. Replacing the USB cable makes no difference.

I guess it's looking more and more like a configuration issue/fault with my piano?

cruiser

How about this: take your wife's laptop to the piano dealer where you bought your CA 91 and ask for assistance. See if the salesperson can connect one of their other CA 91 models to the laptop. (If not, ask them to throw in a free MIDI-to-USB converter because you were expecting this to work. )

They're in Rome, Italy and I'm in Hamburg, Germany :rolleyes:

It definitely sounds more and more like there's a problem with the piano. I gave the Uk contact details before - in my experience the Germans are pretty sound English speakers so you might try the German support .

Cruiser,
i'll try to connect my CA91 to an XP Laptop and a MacBook in order to see what happens.
Just the time to recharge the batteries....
Stefano

MacBook OSX Leopard:
Connected the USB Cable to the laptop and launched garageband.
Everything works fine without any driver (Mac Is Mac...)
In the system profiler i can see the USB description

USB-MIDI:

Versione: 1.00
Potenza bus (mA): 500
Velocità: Fino a 12 Mb/sec
Produttore: KAWAI
ID prodotto: 0x0101
ID fornitore: 0x0f54

Now i'm sure that the CA91 and cable are ok so i can start to play with XP.

Stefano

Well, as neither computer detects the CA91 successfully, I am inclined to agree - the problem would appear to be related to the piano itself, unfortunately. Possibly a faulty USB board?

Kind regards,
James
x

Windows XP:
strange things...
The PC does not recognize the USB-MIDI device but a generic USB Speaker. I will investigate tomorrow.

Cruiser, please check in control panel hardare tab/ system /devices if you see a similar device in the Sound controller, screen, games section (wording may be wronc because i'm translating); if you see the device, right click on it and go to detail tabs - you should see a string with 0x0f54 inside.
In any case if you go back to the list of pheripherals and delete the usb soundboard (click on it and hit del key, answering ok to the alert windows) you may remove the device; then go to action menu and select detect new hardware action. In my pc the system detect an usb-midi card with the yellow triangle (warning) and after few second it disappear changing in usb sounboard.
So it's all for the moment, but if you experiment the same experience on your pc, the ca91 is ok.
let me know...
Stefano

Thanks Stefano, and good to hear from you - I'm in work right now but I'll try to do as you suggest when I get home this evening. Something tells me that the piano is not at fault, but that's probably just wishful thinking on my part!

In the meantime, if you discover anything else which may help, please let me know

Michael

I am communicating with Kawai Tech Support over this problem and I'll report the outcome as soon as there is one!

I suggest you to ask them how to check if the kawai driver is correctly installaed. I suspect that the problem may be there...
Stefano

Thanks Stefano, I'll do that

Just installed this - cheers for the link!

While I'm waiting for a reply from Kawai Tech Support, can someone please tell me how I can check to see if the Kawai USB-MIDI driver I downloaded is installed and working properly? I can find no mention of the driver anywhere in Control Panel.

Cruser,
i'm pretty sure the driver was not installed on my xp laptop!
If you are a little bit familiar with XP you may try this:
1) form start menu chose run eand type regedit.
2) Click on the first item (to be sure you run serach from the top).
3) use ctrl F keys to find kawai string. If you don't fint it your driver are not prperly installed.
4) Close regedit
Warning: regedit is the registry editor and you may cause serious damage to the OS if you try to alter contens!

Yesterday i made a little progress on my XP: I opened the control panel system and disabled the USB Speaker Driver appeared after connecting my CA91. Then i made a right click on the disabled items and chose "upgrade driver". In the driver form i selected to specify manually the driver path and entered the directory where i unzipped CA91 usb drievrs.
After that my XP recognized the Kawai drivers! I can see it in the control panel and the serach in regedit is ok.
I Hope this may help you in some way.
Pls let me know if you have any news from kawai.
Stefano

PS: I will be overseas until friday and i'm not sure i will be able to access to the forum..

@cruiser: did it finally work?

I have the same problem with a Dell Latitude D620, Windows XP Prof and KAWAI MP8-II. When I plug the USB cable in the stage piano, it is recognized by Windows and added as Audio-USB-Midi Device but I can't neither select as MIDI-Output Device nor as MIDI Device in Sampler Software...

I guess it is a Windows problem... any ideas? would be a great help... thanks

On my laptop, with the Clavinova USB cable NOT plugged in, this is what my "Sounds and Audio Devices" panel looks like. This is the Audio tab:


Then, if I close that panel, plug in the USB cable, and restart that panel, it looks like this:


Notice that I have a choice of the built-in sound card or the Clavinova.

What does yours look like?

thank you for reply.

I tried so many things and I'm not a windows/pc newbie... it's desperate...

when I connect the USB to the laptop (and yes, I tried all ports) I see that windows recognizes an Audio-MIDI-USB-whatever device. I also see it in the hardware device manager and the driver is ok.

I also installed the KAWAI USB Driver and updated the generic Windows USB MIDI driver with this one. Always with the same result:

I can't select the Kawai MP8-II as a MIDI Device. Therefore I see only "Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth". At every combination of drivers and USB ports it never appeared something else than this SW Synth.

So my guess is that Windows loads the USB driver correctly but then it doesn't recognize somehow, that this device is also MIDI enabled somehow...

I searched in google and found a lot of stuff but nothing solved the problem. I also updated the soundcard driver of the laptop (SigmaTel) but still no luck.

Meanwhile I guess it's hopeless... I will have to buy an external MIDI Soundcard with built-in MIDI interface...

If anyone has a hint, would be great...

Half a year late on this reply, but hopefully help someone else down the road...

While trying to fix the same problem, I found this thread - then figured out how to fix it myself based on something someone else suggested.

I have a CN4, and WinXP - connecting via USB.
CN4 was recognized only as a generic USB Audio Device because it loaded automatically with the generic Windows driver.
No Add hardware dialogue - the system said a generic USB audio device was found and then immediately followed by new hardware successfully installed and ready to use.

In Device Manager - right click USB Audio device, and update driver.
No to checking for updates through Windows update.
Install from list or specific location, then...
Don't search, I will choose the driver.

If you've already installed the Kawai-USB driver on your computer, the Kawai driver should be in the list of available drivers in the following window.
Select the Kawai driver, install, and then check Device Manager again to be sure. Should show up as Kawai USB etc.

Good luck!

Two more thoughts to add to a year-old thread. (Too bad I didn't see this a year ago when I fixed these problems on my MP-8.) The first thing I learned is that if your computer is old and only has USB 1.1, it will not work. The Kawai won't see it. Also, if your XP computer is updated to Service Pack 2 or 3 you shouldn't need the Kawai drivers. Microsoft's native USB MIDI driver will run the keyboard just fine (at least on my 8-year old laptop).

Finally, if you fuss too long loading/unloading MIDI devices and drivers you will thoroughly trash the MIDI drivers with multiple conflicting entries in the Registry. A useful free utility I've found is MidiFixUtil.EXE. (It's pretty easy to find on the Internet.) It apparently was written years ago by a hardware vendor that was having driver problems. What it does is wipe all existing MIDI drivers off the PC and resets the registry to the default values. Then you can boot the computer, plug in the USB cable running to the keyboard, and let Windows find and install the device from scratch.