The problem is that even though my devices are recognized in Control Panel/ Sound and in Device Manager, no MIDI data actually flows and I cannot sync my keyboard to the Yamaha software that edits it. The error message in the Yamaha software reads “The following MIDI ports can not be opened at this time”. At first, MIDI was working and I could sync up, but after about a week, it failed and has not worked since.
I have been working directly with Yamaha tech support on the issue for some time. I have a Yamaha SX70 XS keyboard, which is recognized by Windows as a connected USB device. It is self-powered, not powered by USB. I am using the Yamaha USB-MIDI driver version
3.1.2 for Windows 7 64-bit (the latest driver). And the latest versions of all their editing software for Win7 64-bit. They assure me that those work for other users of Win7 64-bit. In my case though, everything shows up in Windows, but MIDI doesn’t actually
work.
Yamaha tells me that their USB-MIDI driver is installing fine on my machine, except that it’s missing a windows driver at the bottom of the driver stack. (You can see this in Device Manager, Properties/Driver tab, then Driver Details. The missing driver
is ksthunk.sys, which I think handles kernel streaming. Sounds like that would relate to MIDI data. They have never heard of this driver not showing up there, and they cannot reproduce the problem. ksthunk.sys is on my machine in c:\windows\system32\drivers\
and in the registry the image path is \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\ksthunk.sys
All devices are “working properly” in Windows Device Manager, despite that missing driver. Yamaha MIDI Driver is shown in Control Panel/Sound, and it can be worked with there (opened, closed, configured, etc.). I have also tried three different USB cables
(but those shouldn't be an issue since the keyboard is showing up in Windows).
I was also advised by Yamaha to edit registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32 and remove all midi, midi1, midi2, etc entries, then uninstall and reinstall all drivers. Which I did, but it didn't help. So far, no amount of re-installation, event viewing, uninstalling devices, numerous reboots,etc has fixed it yet. On this machine, that driver just doesn’t hook up to the Yamaha MIDI driver and show up in the stack.
So it looks like it may be a Windows 7 config problem on my machine, and I'm hoping someone here can give me some advice on how to fix it. The Microsoft forums contain a fair number of users reporting similar problems, some are audio and some are webcam
related. I've followed those threads but haven't found a solution to his one.
This is a Dell XPS 8300 Windows 7 64-bit PC with all the latest updates, only about six weeks old. I've been struggling with the MIDI problem for most of that time. I'm an IT professional (network and systems admin), so you can be fairly technical in your
response.
Any suggestions will be welcome. Thanks in advance.
