Yamaha offers a wide variety of different products for musicians. And the most tricky part in programming them is to handle the menus, the sub-menus and the sub-sub-menus which are accessible through different modes, sub-modes and sub-sub-modes. To make the programming even more interesting for the musician, the only output that the machine gives is found on a minimal, 3×6 cm monochrome display. (Maybe you know now, why I spent 3000€ on my Clavia „Nord Stage“.)

But Yamaha knows about the problems of their costumers(?), so they offer proprietary software to program their products on a PC trough a highly developed GUI with multiple colors and readable text! This works surprisingly well - but only on Windows and Mac OS. Although the hardware is completely compatible with the “snd-usb-audio” kernel module, they did not take the effort to port their software to Linux.

I’ve figured out how to run a Yamaha Motif Rack on Linux using the built-in MIDI-to-USB device and the proprietary “Studio Manager 2.x” and the corresponding plugin for the Motif. Plugins for all digital Yamaha products and the “Studio Manager” itself can be found on Yamahasynth.com.

The first step is the setup of the hardware. Configure the synth to use MIDI-to-USB instead of the DIN connectors. Then connect the synth via USB to your PC. Make shure that the kernel module “snd-usb-audio” is loaded (take a look at lsmod) or compiled into the kernel.

Now the synth should be recognized by the system. Of course, bus and device may vary:

# lsusb | grep Yamaha
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0499:1015 Yamaha Corp.

Now make sure that ALSA finds the MIDI ports. The port numbers may vary depending on your other MIDI devices. The port name depends on your synth:

#aplaymidi -l
Port Client name Port name
72:0 MOTIF-R MOTIF-R MIDI 1
72:1 MOTIF-R MOTIF-R MIDI 2
72:2 MOTIF-R MOTIF-R MIDI 3
72:3 MOTIF-R MOTIF-R MIDI 4
72:4 MOTIF-R MOTIF-R MIDI 5
72:5 MOTIF-R MOTIF-R MIDI 6
72:6 MOTIF-R MOTIF-R MIDI 7
72:7 MOTIF-R MOTIF-R MIDI 8

Perfect! All MIDI ports are available without configuration.

Now the tricky part: The setup.exe both of the “Studio Manager” and the plugin for the synth will fail due to some “fixme”-bugs in Wine. The bugs are related to some MSI issues and are currently unresolved. You have to install both setup.exe on a Windows machine. Then copy the whole folder “C:\Program Files\YAMAHA” from the Windows system to “~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/” on your Linux system. This should copy both the “Studio Manager” and the plugins. Copy the following DLLs from “C:\Windows\system32″ on Windows to “~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/YAMAHA/Studio Manager”:

• SM2DLL.dll
• msvcp60.dll
• smh-qt-mt333.dll
• smh-qtoptserver.dll
• smlogcfg.dll

Now there is one big problem: The plugin is registered to the “Studio Manager” through the installation process. So all entries in the registry are not set in Wine. So run “regedit” on Windows and export every registry node that carries a value with the path to your plugin. They can be found with the search string “YAMAHA\Studio Manager\$your_plugin_name”. There are about 7 entries just in [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\] - you have to export each individal node. Don’t forget the node [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Yamaha\].

Copy all exported nodes on Linux. Open each of them in notepad and save it once again (just type notepad in a shell). This is a workaround for a bug in Wine’s version of “regedit”. Now import all exported patches to the registry on the Linux machine. Regedit is also available on Wine.

After that, the “Studio Manager” will run and it will find your plugin. Now enjoy making music!

Dieser Eintrag wurde am Mittwoch, 28. Februar 2007 um 15:15 erstellt und ist unter Linux, Linux-Audio, Musik abgelegt. Du kannst jegliche Antworten zu diesem Beitrag über den RSS 2.0-Feed verfolgen. Du kannst Kommentare schreiben, indem du hier eine Antwort hinterlässt oder einen Trackback von deiner Seite setzt.