The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #119635 Message #2596131
Posted By: JohnInKansas
24-Mar-09 - 10:46 AM
Thread Name: Tech: USB MIDI and Vista
Subject: RE: Tech: USB MIDI and Vista
In Vista, the external audio inputs are "muted" by default. If you plug in a microphone or external audio device you have to go to the "sound" icon in the Startup Tray (bottom right toolbar) and double-click to open it and "unmute" the inputs you want. A single click just brings up the master volume, which you can mute or adjust there. A double-click should open the actual "sound card" controls - if you have an actual sound card.
If you have an add-on sound card (not just integral-on-the-motherboard sound, you may also find a separate icon for the sound card in the same Startup Tray that offers some more options.
My Vista (Business) plays midi files just fine, using Media Player as the default player and it also works with a couple of accessory programs I use occasionally to play midi files. I haven't tried any external midi devices with it though, so I haven't found where to tell it to send midi back and forth between devices.
(My scoring program had to be set up internally to recognize midi sound generators (wave tables), even with XP. That's usually a set-and-forget thing, but you might look inside your program(s) for settings?)
The external USB midi adapter that I have required installing its own "driver" to get a hookup in XP, but frankly I haven't tried it in Vista since my keyboard is crap and not worth hooking up.
Vista changed the names of everything, but I suspect that your best bet would be to look in Device Manager for settings you might need to tweak. Vista is supposed to be able to "find and install transparently" any drivers/codecs you need, and usually does a fairly decent job of it; but seems much less flexible if you want to argue with it about what it does. If it doesn't recognize the USB device as a midi device, there may not be a button for midi in the control panel.
If all else fails, sometimes you can click on Help and search for something like "midi." In Vista, you want to always include web content since the built-in-on-the-machine help(less) files are total crap. (A broad generalization certified as always accurate based on about a year with Vista.)
John