HomeStudioGuide.com - Guide to Home Studio Recording

I noticed a lot of people asking this question "How do I setup MIDI on my Mac OSX computer (Macbook, Mac Pro, or PowerPC)" so I hope to write a simple and short tutorial for this.

This procedure or steps has been tested on OSX running on PowerPC and Intel chips. It has worked from a simple 2x2 interface to a full-blown 8x8 midi router/merger interface.

1. Connect your midi interface to your Mac computer. Most probably, this will be done via USB. Some models are connected via firewire, but usually, these are combo units. i.e. audio interface and midi interface.

If you need to install drivers for your midi device, go ahead and install it and follow the manufacturer's direction. Depending on the manufacturer, it could be a simple click on a Setup program, or manually copying files to your hard drive.

2. Open up Applications > Utilities




3. Click on Audio Midi Setup.



4. Click on Midi Devices



5. At this point, if the device driver was installed successfully, (and the device is powered on), you will see it represented on your Audio Midi Setup screen.  You can change the icon representation by double-clicking on the device, and selecting a photo from the list of options provided.

Note: If you want "custom" icons for your Audio Midi Setup, I'll show that to you on another lesson.



On the above screenshot, you can see my Edirol 8x8 midi interface, and my MOTU 828mk2 audio/midi interface. For this setup, we'll just the midi ports on the Edirol 8x8 unit.

Click on "Add Device"



A new icon appears on the workspace.


You'll notice there are 2 arrows on the device.  These represents the MIDI IN and OUT jacks or ports.



The "RULE" is, the MIDI OUT from a device goes to the MIDI IN of another device. 

MIDI OUT does NOT go to the MIDI OUT of another device. Don't make this common mistake.

The first thing we're adding is our midi controller.  So let's change the label from "new external device" to "My MIDI Controller" or "My keyboards" or whatever you want.

Double-click on the icon. A new window pops-up.



So just change the Device Name, and if you want, you may also type in the "Manufacturer" name and "Model number" or select it from the lis. You may also select a different icon. This is what our icon now looks like.


Next, we need to connect the MIDI OUT of "My Keyboard" to the MIDI IN of the Midi interface (in this case, my Edirol UM-880). The UM-880 is an 8x8 interface, so you'll see 8 pairs of MIDI IN/OUT ports.

I want to connect my keyboard controller to the first port, so I need to connect it to the first port on the diagram.

On this diagram, you can see that I connected the MIDI OUT of the keyboard controller to the MIDI IN of the Edirol UM-880.

Just place your mouse on the arrow, click, and drag the mouse. You'd see a "flexible wire" that you can move around and connect to other midi devices.


Now, let's do the same for the MIDI OUT of the Edirol UM-880 going to the MIDI IN of the keyboard.




And we're done! 

Good... but I also have other midi devices. I have a Roland XV-5080 synth, and an AKAI S6000 sampler, and a Novation analog synth,  so let's connect them all using the same procedures I outlined above.

So you click on "Add Device", then enter the device name, manufacturer, model #, change the icon, and wire the MIDI IN and OUT wires to the midi interface.

And here's the finished setup.



You probably noticed something odd. The USB Trigger Finger is showing as "faded." Why?

At one time, I had this device connected to my computer. But since it's not connected when I took the screenshots, it's showing "Grayed out" because OSX could not find the device.

An interesting icon is the Network Icon. 

Did you know that you can setup different computers and hook them up using MIDI over LAN? Click here for detailed instructions.