I purchased this new Airwave device from ROLI on November 2024. I knew it would take a couple of months to get the device, similar to my RISE 2, but didn’t think it would take more than a year. It took more time than expected to fully test the device and there were some manufacturing hurdles throughout the process. At least, ROLI provided regular updates to customers and finally shipped the units.
Friday, November 28th 2025, I finally got the device. Given the time it took to get this device ready, I was hoping for a flawless setup and use. I was deeply mistaken. It took my whole Friday evening to make this work very partially, only with the standalone player, no recording possible unless I switch to the two-computer setup I don’t have room to put up and I want to avoid for years. The next day, I found a solution to make the VST work. Nevertheless, the calibration never completes and the device is pretty limited in the end, although working from an hardware point of view. It is however perfectly possible the Airwave Player software will evolve into a full synth and calibration bugs will get fixed officially eventually.
What is the ROLI Airwave supposed to do?
The Airwave tracks hand movements using a camera and translates them into MIDI signals. This adds to the 5 dimensions of air on top of the dimensions of touch. The device detects when hands are raised, bent, moved left or right or twisted. A dedicated software synthesizer, Airwave Player, takes into account the new 5 dimensions of air and the existing 5 dimensions of touch, adding more richness and variations to sound. The Airwave Player has a fixed number of presents, no editor. However, the Airwave produces MIDI CC. With a bit of work, these CC could be mapped to parameters in any other software synthesizers.
The device looks like on the following picture:
The Airwave is plugged to computer using its USB C port, with the provided C to C cable or an C to A cable. There is another USB C port to power the device.
There is a connector for an expression pedal as well as an audio jack, not sure what the jack is used for.
A MIDI controller, preferably from ROLI, e.g., a Seaboard Block, can be either connected independently to the computer through another USB port, or plugged in one of the front ports of the Airwave using the provided magnetic connectors.
A difficult setup
When I plugged my new Airwave device, ROLI Connect could not see it, making it impossible to register it. Registration is necessary to get access, from ROLI Connect, to the ROLI Airwave Control and ROLI Airwave Player software. After I passed this hurdle, I was not getting any hand tracking from Airwave Player because I had to create the virtual MIDI port I didn’t know about. This second road block behind, hand tracking was working but I faced issues with calibration; either it is broken, either Airwave Player just doesn’t report calibration is done, letting the user guess it is completed or not. After all these efforts, a wasted Friday evening with a lot of frustration, I was able to try my new device with standalone ROLI Airwave Player, but when trying the VST in my DAW, no hand tracking occurred. I had to find another trick, requiring a basic understanding on how the device works, to get past this.
Device registration not working
When I connected my new ROLI Airwave, I heard the usual sound showing Windows detected the device, but it was invisible from ROLI Connect. I tried both USB ports, tried with a USB A to C cable instead of the provided C to C cable, to no avail. I started to think the device was dead on arrival but at least I got confirmation from Device Manager that the device was detected:
The Ultraleap device is the Airwave’s camera. The ROLI Airwave Pedal is a MIDI source mapped with the pedal connector on the device. The presence of the Seaboard Block shows that USB was properly passing from my Seaboard Block M through my Airwave. Despite all this, nothing in ROLI Connect!
After a while, I found that once again, ROLI Dashboard was broken! Pretty much each time ROLI Connect auto-updates, it kills the ROLI Hardware Driver service instead of leaving it alone or updating it properly. It’s been more than a year this bug exists, I’m not getting why it hasn’t been fixed and how non-techical users are able to deal with the issue. Once again, I had to manually reinstall the ROLI Hardware Driver so ROLI Dashboard started to recognize my devices again.
After this step, ROLI Connect was able to see and register my new Airwave device. This unlocked ROLI Airwave Control and ROLI Airwave Player which I installed.
No hand tracking
After I installed ROLI Airwave Player, I started it. I was able to play notes and experience the 5 dimensions of touch. However, moving my hands in front of the camera had no effect. Searching the Web uncovered the possibility of a broken camera. I started to think I would need to return the device to the manufacturer, which annoyed me a lot.
The problem was missing virtual MIDI port named ROLI Airwave Expression. I already had loopMIDI installed. I started the tool and created the port.
I was puzzled about how this works. The ROLI Airwave Service, which I checked was running, is hard-coded to write to that MIDI port. It doesn’t create it, assuming it’s already there. The user has to install some tool like loopMIDI and create the port.
After that, I was able to try calibrating the device. This is done by starting Airwave Control and clicking on Recalibrate.
This starts the Airwave Player.
I clicked on my Seaboard Block M device and was asked to press on the highlighted keys to calibrate.
The instructions are quite misleading, asking to press both keys with my index fingers, while three keys are lit up: the C, the F and the G! After I pressed the leftmost C key and the rightmost F, tried G, tried F and G, the screen changed to the following.
Trying to press keys closer to the middle gives no result. Calibration never completes. Fortunately, the device reacts to hand movement, so at least its camera is not broken.
Some research shows that there was a bug with calibration in prior versions of Airwave Player. I double checked (checked multiple times in fact) I was running latest version, to no avail. Some users contacted ROLI and got special limited availability betas of Airwave Player for which calibration works.
This process is totally inefficient, for both users and ROLI staff. Users will try calibrating, fail, some will just return the device thinking it is defective, others will report the issue and get the special beta then go on. ROLI staff, on the other hand, will bef flooded with the same request, for multiple users, to get the special beta.
Question: why not release that beta? If calibration doesn’t complete out of the box, this will confuse many users and could cause unnecessary returns.
Another possibility is that calibration never completes by design and the user has to guess this is calibrated. This is in my opinion as poor as having users request a special beta individually.
I hope this issue will get fixed over time or the UI will be clarified. This device has potential, but the shortcomings need to be addressed first.
At least, I was able to start playing with my new device. It was not just dead on arrival at this point.
However, I don’t want to just play with the device. I want to record myself. Then enters the DAW: Ableton Live.
As I was expecting, ROLI provided a VST for Airwave.
I added the VST to a MIDI track and configured my input as the Seaboard. I tried with the ROLI Airwave Pedal and ROLI Airwave Expression inputs to no avail. Only the Seaboard MIDI input was flowing MIDI into the VST, generating sound.
As soon as the VST produces sound, it is possible to create an audio track and configure the input of the track to be the output of the MIDI track+VST. This technique records the audio of the VST as is and can reproduce the audio reliably.
Why not just record the MIDI notes? This is because the VST has a state, i.e., the current preset being selected. If you record just the MIDI, you have to take note of which preset is selected and make sure that preset is the same when you replay your track, otherwise you get different audio.
All of this worked, same way as with any other VST such as ROLI Studio Player, Arturia’s Analog Lab V, Sampleson Scaper, etc. However, no hand tracking worked!
Out of the box, this only works with the standalone Airwave Player, not the VST. Solution? Once again, have a two computer setup. I don’t have enough room on my desk to put these two computers and I find such a setup cumbersome.
So back to square 1, RMA it would be!
The two computer setup I don’t want
It’s been several times I’m wondering about that, mainly because of VST instability. If a VST has a bug, it can easily crash the whole DAW, completely ruining recording sessions. For example, Scaper from Sampleson crashes the whole DAW if I change preset too often or too quickly. ROLI Studio Player has a sad history of crashes. Some DAWs like Reaper sandbox VSTs, most don’t. Implementing VST sandboxing would be a major change requiring a lot of refactoring. If VSTs are too unstable and I don’t want to switch DAW, the only remaining solution is to record with one computer and run the plugin on another machine.
flowchart Controller[MIDI Controller] Computer1[Computer with player] DAC[Digital to analog interface] ADC[Analog to digital interface] Computer2[Computer with DAW] Controller --> Computer1 Computer1 --> DAC DAC -->|Jack cable|ADC ADC --> Computer2
This setup, while shielding the DAW from VST crashes and working around when only standalone player is available, is quite cumbersome. Having to turn digital audio to analog and back to digital can cause quality reduction unless high end audio interfaces are used. It would be far better to move audio digitally from the two computers, S/PDIF may allow this, but this is not fully reliable.
The single computer recording trick
I fortunately found a way to record with hand tracking. I needed to come up with an understanding of how the Airwave works (see next section) to figure this out. Web search or AI would give false information, including the VST cannot play audio, only Airwave Player can track hand movement, etc.
Main idea is to have two MIDI tracks: the main track taking MIDI from Seaboard device and outputting to Airwave VST, a secondary MIDI track taking MIDI from ROLI Airwave Expression (yes, the virtual MIDI device we created with loopMIDI) and outputting to the primary track. In other words, we need to combine MIDI from two different sources and feed that combined MIDI into the VST.
More specifically, you first need to ensure MPE is enabled for both MIDI ports and the VST. For this, go to Live’s Preferences, MIDI section, and enable MPE for the MIDI inputs.
Then create a new MIDI track, adding the Airwave VST to it. Click on the … icon of the VST and turn on MPE.
Set the MIDI device and do one of the following: arm the track or set monitoring to In. If you arm the track, you will be able to record the MIDI, but if you play a lot with the dimensions of touch and air, this generates over-cluttered MIDI tracks that have a tendency to slow down and even crash Live. Not arming the track is a workaround but you then need to turn on monitoring so MIDI flows through.
Now create a second MIDI track. Set the input to Airwave Expression and output MIDI to the first track. This time, just set the monitoring to In. All MIDI will land in first track so if you want to capture it, just arm the first track.
Almost there! Now create the audio track. Set its input as the output of the VST, and arm it.
You can validate the setup by checking the gauges besides All Channels. If you press keys on your Seaboard, you get activity on first MIDI track. If you move your hands in front of the camera, you get activity in the second MIDI track. If audio works, you get activity in first track and the audio track. Now you can record!
You should save this non-trivial setup in a template for future use otherwise you’ll fight with Live each time you start a new session.
Voila. This is how I record at the moment.
How does it work?
Following diagram shows the architecture as far as I could guess it. The presence of all these moving parts explains why issues like the ones I experienced can arise.
flowchart LR
subgraph ROLI Airwave
Camera
MIDI[MIDI interface]
AirwaveUSB[USB interface]
end
AirwaveService[ROLI Airwave Service]
HardwareDriver[ROLI Hardware Driver]
VirtualMIDIPort["ROLI Airwave Expression (loopMIDI)"]
VirtualMIDIPort2["Virtual MIDI port (multi client)"]
AirwavePlayer[ROLI Airwave Player]
Dashboard[ROLI Dashboard]
Control[ROLI Airwave Control]
MIDI --> HardwareDriver
HardwareDriver --> VirtualMIDIPort2
Camera & MIDI --> AirwaveUSB
Camera --> AirwaveService
AirwaveService --> VirtualMIDIPort
VirtualMIDIPort & VirtualMIDIPort2 --> AirwavePlayer
VirtualMIDIPort --> Control
VirtualMIDIPort2 --> Dashboard
The ROLI Airwave device interacts with a computer using a USB C port. The device has two ports: one used for power through a provided adapter, another used for data. The USB data interface exposes at least two components: a webcam-style camera and a MIDI interface. MIDI can come from an expression pedal that can be plugged onto the device and from Seaboard if plugged to one of the front ports.
A new system service called ROLI Airwave Service reads from the camera and turns image into MIDI CC, most probably using some form of neural network. The fact that CPU fan runs all the time when device is plugged in lets me believe the processing is CPU-based, while it could make use of my NVIDIA RTX GPU to reduce CPU usage. The MIDI CC from hand tracking is sent into a virtual MIDI port named ROLI Airwave Expression. ROLI doesn’t provide its own MIDI driver for this, rather letting the user install loopMIDI himself and create the port.
On the other hand, MIDI from the BLOCK devices (Seaboard, Lightpad, etc.) is processed by another service called ROLI Hardware Driver. The driver sends the MIDI data to another virtual MIDI port created by a proprietary multi-client driver.
This complexity is the result of a limitation in Windows, where any MIDI connection is exclusive. If a DAW reads from a MIDI device, another DAW or dashboard software cannot read at the same time. The ROLI Airwave Expression virtual port is read by both ROLI Airwave Player (or a DAW+VST setup) and the ROLI Airwave Control supposed to participate in the calibration process. The BLOCK virtual MIDI port is read from players (Airwave Player, Studio Player, DAW+VST) and ROLI Dashboard needed to perform settings and firmware updates on the devices. The architecture also allows to consolidate BLOCK devices into one virtual device used by Studio Player.
