In short, yes.
I’m getting quite a few visitors who have searched Google to discover whether the Yahama DGX 630 can be used with Apple’s Garageband on OS X, or whether there are Mac drivers available for the instrument - understandable, I guess, as I mention the DGX630 and Garageband quite a lot in the same posts.
Anyway, you can use the DGX with Garageband and other Mac OS X apps - only you wouldn’t think so from reading the material that comes packaged with the piano.
What you need to enable your Mac (and therefore Garageband) to be able to communicate with your DGX is the right USB MIDI driver - a piece of software that allows your Mac to decode the signals coming out of the piano’s USB port and interpret them as MIDI instructions, the standard format for electronic instruments talking to one another.
However, the CD that arrives in the box with the piano only contains drivers for Windows. You can download the DGX 630 Mac driver from here:
http://music.yamaha.com/downloads/drivers/usb-midi/um111mx.zip
It’s just over 3MB in size, and Yamaha specifies the following system requirements (which most Mac users should meet easily, these days):
* Mac OS X Version 10.2.8 - 10.5.4
* Macintosh computer and a USB port with a Power Mac G3 or higher, or using Intel Processor
* 2MB or more available Hard Disk space
* 128MB or more available memory
Download, unzip and click to install. For more information, visit the Yahama DGX 630 downloads page.
Once you’ve installed the driver, use a USB cable to connect the DGX to your Mac (the USB out port is on the back of the keyboard, about level with the D an octave above Middle C). Then use OS X’s built-in Audio Midi Setup tool to detect it, if Garageband doesn’t do the job automatically. By the way, it’s worth pointing out that once the DGX is set up with your Mac, it works just like any other MIDI instrument so you’re not restricted to using it with Garageband. Other DAWS (such as Logic and Logic Express) will also read MIDI data from it quite happily.
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