MIDI support in Sierra

Hey Andrew (and everyone else here),

I was in the same boat as you. RD-700GX and using professionally as a MIDI controller until I mistakenly upgraded to Sierra too soon. I've been frustrated to not see an update from Roland aside from their message from October 3rd saying new drivers were still in development.

I got in direct contact with Roland about the issue today and am glad to report it can be resolved quite easily. It's just a matter of changing the USB Driver setting on the keyboard itself. Just follow the directions on page 142 of the manual here https://static.roland.com/assets/media/pdf/RD-700GX_OM.pdf and set the USB Driver to GENERIC rather than ORIGINAL. After re-booting the keyboard and reconnecting it worked within Kontakt again (and other MIDI-related DAW software).

Good luck.

SpartanAntartican,

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Roland, Apple, & Finale corps should all give you a prize - or hire you.

In going through the procedures, I, myself, forgot one of the three principles of electronics:
1) Is it plugged in? 2) Is it turned on? 3) The output goes to the input.
Finally realizing that my MIDI cable was instead plugged into my pre-Sierra, job-saving, MacBook - all it took was to plug it in to my Sierra-fied iMac.

After I restored back to the old OS I partitioned my hard drive and installed Sierra on the new partition so I can test things to find out what happened to midi. I am convinced it is something in the os and not a third party issue. I only have my gig software in the other partition running El Captain and turned off wifi and notification. I should have done this before but I just started giging and had not had any issues. This was a warning, not to let anything touch what I use to gig with.

Glad to help out in some way 😉

Today I had confirmation from Roland that once the new drivers are released there is no actual need to update, as the GENERIC driver does all the same things. The ORIGINAL driver just names things differently, which is what their update will fix.

Now we can all get back to making music 🙂

Ok.. I have a Roland A500S, a discontinued product. I tried installing the linked driver on rolands news post. It actually worked, but a bummer was I had to restart the computer every time to make it work again whenever I started making music. Now it seems to have completely stopped working... Does anyone know of some neat command line hack or something to sidestep whatever the issue is? I thought I read somewhere that it was some kind of new security thing in sierra.. This is such a bummer.. I've lost countless hours on this issue by now, being unable to produce music.. Do I even dare buying a Roland A88 at this point? Will it work? (I need the Roland pitch bend so anything else is pretty much off the table, is it going extinct by the way? I sure hope not, its super essential for me)

Fantastic, that fixed it (p65 of manual for A800-Pro: switch USB ADV DRIVER off). Why don't Roland actually say that on their support page?

SpartanAntartican:

Fantastic, that fixed it (p65 of manual for A800-Pro: switch USB ADV DRIVER off). Why don't Roland actually say that on their support page?

I would also like to thank you for that. Worked for my A 49 too.

Glad to hear. Rock on!

It seems one of those things that has just slipped between the cracks. At least we have online communities like this to help each other. 🙂

Hi dude,

I have the A800-Pro and I tried your method...still no go! What am I doing wrong??? Can you tell me exactly what you did in steps?

Thanks