UX16

The UX16 USB-MIDI Interface is about the easiest way to connect your musical keyboard to your computer. If your computer has a USB jack (most computers in the last few years do), you simply connect the UX16 to your USB connector on your computer and plug the MIDI in and out cables (shown shortened in the photo above - the actual length of the USB cable is 2 feet and the length of the MIDI cables is a little over 4 feet) into your keyboard. You will have to install a "driver" so that your computer knows about the UX16 and the driver is included with the interface on a CD-ROM.

Many people that purchase keyboards would love to be able to save and edit their songs in the computer, the same way that they use Word Processors. Having a graphical display, whether you choose the Piano Roll view or Notation view, makes it very easy to fix any errors you may have made playing your song. Of course, composers like the fact that they can print their masterpieces. Once you are connected to your computer, you will need some kind of music software. There are many kinds of software available for handling music, from very inexpensive to thousands of dollars.

Yamaha makes a reasonably priced product called XGworks that works on PCs or Macs. Follow the link to find out more about this wonderful piece of software that allows you to change the voices or volumes on individual tracks, score any track(s) you like (PC only) and edit pitch, volume and timing of individual notes on those tracks. Once you get the song the way you want, you can e-mail it to your friends and relatives so that they can hear you at your best!

Your computer must have a USB jack. The System Requirements are as follows:

All Yamaha portable keyboards made in the last few years have MIDI jacks on the back (5-pin din jacks). Most of our digital pianos, including Clavinova, also have MIDI jacks on the back. Any keyboard, it doesn't have to be Yamaha, that has MIDI connectors will work with the UX16. If your keyboard does not have a disk drive, one of the only ways you can save a performance permanently is to connect your keyboard to a computer and play it into the music software. If you do have a disk drive, you could record your song to your floppy disk and then open that file in your computer. At this point, you do not have to actually connect your keyboard to your computer. The song would play back on your internal sound card in your computer (provided you have one). If you want to be able to make changes (edit) to the song and hear in real-time what it will sound like on your keyboard, then you would want to have the computer and the keyboard connected together. That's where the UX16 comes in.

The UX16 can handle 16 channels of simultaneous playback. This will support your music production system with one MIDI OUT port (16 channels) and one MIDI IN port (16 channels). This is the number of channels you need to create and playback General MIDI files.

With a USB connection, you can connect and disconnect the USB cable while the power to the computer is on. The UX16 operates on USB bus power and does not require a power adaptor or batteries. The indicator lights show if the UX16 is connected properly to your USB jack and there are also lights to indicate when it is receiving MIDI IN & OUT. This is very handy to verify operation. You can easily expand the number of ports by using a USB hub to connect multiple UX16 units. A maximum of 32 units can be connected, but this would depend on your system.

Download the Latest USB Drivers