Windows doesn’t come set up out of the box for inter-application MIDI, but the capability can be added with a free driver. This guide is for Windows XP and earlier—it’s likely to just crash your DAW on Win10 until you uninstall it.

Step 1. Download the MIDI-Yoke driver. Choose the installer version, not the manual install, so you can easily get rid of it later if you want to.

Step 2. Right-click on the installer and choose Troubleshoot compatibility.

Step 3. Click Test the program. Unintuitively, this will actually perform the installation.

Step 4. Reboot.

Step 5. Download and install the MidiMapper utility.

Step 6. Choose a MIDI-Yoke port using the MidiMapper to enable inter-application MIDI.