I have 3 CMC controllers - CH, AI, and TP.
They’ve all worked perfectly for years.
But today I noticed that although all three show up perfectly in CB Pro 15 MIDI port manager, only CH is working. The other two have a power light, but don’t work at all.
I believe this problem has been caused by the huge MIDI updates which are currently taking place to move us all from 1980s MIDI to modern MIDI2 and class compliancy - that is, no additional drivers required to be installed by the user - true MIDI plug and play, and a lot of other really good stuff.
However, it seems that there are currently problems as the developers deal with incompatible devices. I have tried with and without the traditional Yamaha Steinberg USB drivers and currently nothing works without these drivers, and only the CH works with them.
It seems that at this time the CMC series just isn’t compatible and this is why you see your problems. Each month the dev team is addressing more and more devices to bring them to work with the new and much better situation.
It’s important to note that this problem isn’t a Steinberg bug, but an industry problem while the new MIDI2 reaches maturity. I believe the development work is being done on behalf of Microsoft.
Fundamentally, some of these problems have been caused by devs of the traditional drivers over the years not keeping to all the rules of port handling etc in their coding and this has caused many problems for many people using traditional drivers since about February 2026.
We can only hope the devs continue to do speedy improvements to the MIDI2 code to include many more hardware devices. Once you do eventually get your stuff working under the new regime you will have a much more robust system than before.
I too find the current situation frustrating, but I also believe the wait for the final solution is worthwhile. We just need to keep a dialogue going so the devs include our products in the agenda for compatibility testing sooner rather than later.
I expect your current experience of the CMC controllers working one day and not the next is related to Microsoft updates which include new updates to the MIDI2 code. These updates have been pushed out without warning users, which to me is a problem, yet on the other hand, this is so complex I’m not sure how they could have explained what was happening to end users at the time. I just hope the current holes in the code get patched quickly and we can move on with our lives and use out MIDI gear without fear it won’t work apparently randomly.
I do not want to see my CMC controllers die a death just because of MIDI2. They may be a few years old now, but they are good controllers and fit my usage profile perfectly, and I have no desire to have to go out and buy new controllers.
If you have more than one CMC-FD unit, unit 1 works using the method above but you need to name units 2+ differently. Here’s my second FD:
