Korg nanoKontrol2 MIDI Not Recognized

I finally got my 2 new toys: a Korg nanoKONTROL2 and a nanoPAD2. The initial installation was quick and painless: unwrap nanoKONTROL2/nanoPAD2, hook it up to the PC with USB a cable, and Windows happily recognized the new devices and installed the default drivers for them. The following installation steps, install the KORG USB-MIDI Driver, update the system software and using Kontrol Editor , proved to be more challenging…

 

Installing the KORG USB-MIDI Driver

I located the support section for the nanoSERIES2 controllers (click on SUPPORT below the product image), downloaded the latest USB-MIDI Driver for PC (1.13-r6 at the time of this writing) and installed the drivers for both controllers. No errors, all seemed well.

 

Controller software updates

Next up, updating the controllers with the latest software updates: nanoKONTROL2_Updater_0103 and nanoPAD2_Updater_0104. This is where the trouble started showing itself: Error – Update device is not found. Looking at the “Config…” menu option the only MIDI device recognized was my Yamaha Portable G-1 device. The two nano controllers were nowhere to be found, even when trying to manually select a MIDI device.

Similarly troublesome was the Kontrol Editor device selection dialog at startup, both controllers were not recognized.

 

Troubleshooting

Basic troubleshooting of the issue consisted of un-/reinstalling the device drivers through device manager and un-/reinstalling the USB-MIDI Driver in various orders, with reboots in between, but after a couple of hours going through that with still no results I decided to look beyond the Korg drivers.
The only other thing that could possibly interfere seemed to be the Yamaha Portable G-1 USB-MIDI driver, so as a last resort I uninstalled it, rebooted and reinstalled the Korg USB-MIDI drivers. SUCCESS! The nanoKONTROL2 and nanoPAD2 finally showed up as MIDI devices, allowing me to update the controller software and use Kontrol Editor. This left me without support for my Yamaha keyboard however, so I downloaded and installed the latest Yamaha USB-MIDI Driver,  um310x86 – which was two versions up from my installed version, verified all USB-MIDI devices were still functional. Rebooted. Verified all USB-MIDI devices were STILL functional, and they still were!

 

Afterthoughts

Having to uninstall the Yamaha USB-MIDI driver still seems strange to me, but apparently did the trick. If this trick worked for you, or if it didn’t, please leave me a comment!