Using CMC controllers as generic MIDI devices on an M1 Mac?

Steinberg Hardware Legacy Steinberg Hardware
1

I know that the CMC controllers have been discontinued and aren’t officially supported on the latest operating systems. But these are such cool devices. Is there any way to get them to work as generic MIDI devices for use on current platforms with any DAW?

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I don’t know if the Steinberg driver is needed to get voltage to the device and tx/rx midi, if it is, that’s a prob on your Mac M1

Best thing to do is to plug one in, run Midi Monitor and look at the output.

The buttons output midi note data, the sliders output pitchbend.

1 Like
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Thanks. I’ll give that a try!

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CMC are discontinued and maybe not officially supported, but it looks like all of them works in windows 11 and MAC OS 12., and CMC are working fine in the new Cubase 12 Pro.

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Well, plugging the CMC into the Mac Studio and listening with MIDI Monitor gives me nothing. Seems that the driver might be needed. Makumbaria mentions in another post that the drivers work with the latest OS… I may get daring and try, but latest OS + M1 Mac might be a bridge too far.

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Steinberg says that CMC will work in Mac OS 12. and Win 11. I personally know that it works at least in Catalina (and Windows 10 Pro 21H2 too).

I Have PD, CH, AI, TP and QC

But in Big Sur and Monterey you need to install Yamaha driver as an addicional step. Latest firmware (1.11) update is also available.

https://o.steinberg.net/en/support/downloads_hardware/downloads_cmc.html

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Ah that’s good to know.

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I wonder – can the asio driver run in Rosetta while the daw runs native?

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Ok, I may need some handholding here…
The first thing I did was break out my old Windows PC and update the firmware of my CMC devices - this finished successfully.
Then I went to my new Mac Studio (which already has Rosetta) and installed the Tools for CMC (which had an older Yamaha MIDI driver).
Then I installed the newest MIDI driver for Mac (v1.5.0), which required a reboot.
So here I am:
I do not really know how to tell if the Yamaha MIDI driver is actually running, but I did run MIDI Monitor and messed with buttons and sliders and got no MIDI signals whatsoever. The devices do not show up in Apple’s MIDI Studio. They do not show up as MIDI devices in Logic Pro. As far as I can tell, I’m not getting anything from them.
I should say here that I’m not using Cubase on this machine. I just wanted these controllers to work as generic MIDI control surfaces.
Maybe I should give up and just use my iPad and Logic Controller… but I just loved these devices with Cubase and I thought they might be nice to have in my new setup.