this is what i'm currently dealing with...

this is what i'm currently dealing with...

this is what i'm currently dealing with...

I have seen this behavior, but not spontaneously. By this I mean that the behavior of the cursor was more-or-less expected from my fiddling and does not seem to match your experience in terms of usage.

When I saw this happen, I had a "QWERTY" keyboard hooked up to Montage's USB-to-device port. I was experimenting with the keyboard to see if I could force Montage to accomplish a "print screen" to save an image of the screen to a file for documentation purposes. I never did find any QWERTY key combination to accomplish a print-screen-to-file. However, certain keyboard combinations did make the console appear (this blank screen with a cursor). Since Montage is Linux based - Linux generally has one console dedicated to graphics and a bunch of consoles dedicated to text. Normally, the text consoles are attached to a process which serves up a terminal and would have asked for a login/password. Montage has this disabled so you only see a blank screen (which is good - because mucking around with the operating system would do more harm than good).

How - without a QWERTY keyboard - your Montage managed to get into this mode is a question mark. Maybe there are some error conditions that would cause this - ones I have not run into. This is one worth diagnosing - although usually a manufacturer is going to suggest to clear the plate (save what you need to off if you can - i.e. backup - then initialize to factory settings).

If this is a one-off problem then likely sweeping under the rug is tolerable. If this continues to pop up and is readily reproducible then perhaps the init step would be warranted - and after that if it continues then there may be a need for further diagnosis. If I were diagnosing this - I'd want the model numbers, hardware revisions, firmware/bios revisions/etc. of all components involved (including your Montage, computer, and any other hardware devices or cables between). I'd want to know all connections - anything plugged into all USB ports of your Montage, etc. I'd want to know all software/drivers and versions for all that deal with Montage. I may even need to know any other "resident" software that's loaded at the same time. Basically - I'd want to know enough that if I had the same "stuff" here (Montage, computer, cables, etc) I could 100% reproduce the setup. Then I'd want to know the 1) 2) 3) steps of how you reproduce the failure in terms of procedure from flipping the switch of your computer "on" until the reproducible failure. I'd like to know how likely the problem is to pop up - or how many times to re-do the steps until I can expect the failure to occur (every time, ten times, once in a blue moon). Once in a blue moon problems are frustrating to try to reproduce. One always hopes for a failure that's easy to reproduce.

If you do happen to have any unsupported items connected to Montage (a USB hub, an external monitor, an external touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard hooked to Montage -- anything other than an approved USB flash drive on the USB-to-device port or your PC on the USB-to-host port) then I would disconnect all of those things.

I'd even unplug everything from the usb-to-device port as a test even if you do just have an approved flash drive there. Just to help reduce down the configuration to the minimum config to still do this Logic/Montage work.

Using Montage as an audio interface means USB will be more fully utilized than just MIDI. I would take a look at the USB-to-host connected MIDI cable and make sure it's a high quality and relatively short cable. I'm using super long cables so I can have my keyboard far away from the computer - but if I started to have some kind of problem, I would get a shorter USB 2.0 Type A-to-B cable and something that costs more than 99 cents. Not that cost is everything (there are lousy cables at any cost) - but a reputable brand USB cable with strong warranty and mid-range-to-higher cost would be good to have if I depended on it for daily use. If the cable mentions it is shielded - this is preferable to ones that are not or make no mention of shielding.

I'd also trace along my USB cable path and see if there are any aggressors crossing - or worse - running on top of for a parallel length. Like a power cable of some sort or other electrical cable or noise source. I'd try to keep the cable away from other electrical devices or cables that can present noise issues injected into the cable.

You may need to see what outlets both your computer and Montage are plugged into. Ground loop issues or voltage differentials between ground can cause problems. Plugging into the same power strip will get rid of ground potential (voltage level) issues. If you have a laptop with a battery - try plugging it into the wall instead of operating with no common ground reference.

The reason for these is I'm not sure what kind of badness can occur if there's corruption on USB. I do know if there's MIDI overflow (buffer) - Montage handles this fairly gracefully. It tells you this is the case and sort of keeps chugging along. Corruption - I'm not sure what Montage would do.

This is all highly speculative (the corruption theory).

Another quick test would be to limit the bandwidth so the USB path has less data to deal with. You can do this by decreasing the sample rate if you currently have it set to 192kHz for the digital I/O. Seems like 192kHz can be slightly more taxing because it's channels divided by 4 but sample rate times 4.4. But you can try both ways if you have the time to try a bunch of things.

I have more possibilities - but I'll leave some items for others to throw out there.

Power down
Disconnect the USB cable
Reboot the Montage.
If it boots up normally, let us know.

If it returns to the previous blank screen, contact Yamaha Customer Service. If you are here in the USA, please call 917.522.9000 Mon-Fri 8:30am-5:00pm PST

Have your firmware version information available.

Good Afternoon,

Bad Mister, I did as you instructed and the Montage started back up normally. After going back into logic and resuming with recording midi-drums from the Montage. It happened again. This time i was programming a drum patch to send different drums to some of the usb outputs so that I could record the audio separately. I will definitely call them first thing Monday. Thanks!

Jason.... Thanks for the information. This is my 4th Yamaha Keyboard. (PSR-6, Motif ES7, Motif XF6) so before I read your post I thought that I was somewhat knowledgeable when it came to these things. I see now that I have a LOT more to learn so that I can rise to your level. Thanks again for sharing the knowledge!