A key development in the history of electronic music was the invention of the MIDI protocol for sending signals between musical devices. The MIDI system was invented in the 1980s but has undergone changes in the decades since. The D-50 was introduced during an early phase of MIDI technology. Thus the D-50 does not always interact with computers and modern synthesizers as would be expected. In some cases, the transfer of MIDI information is simply too fast for the D-50 to keep up.
There are options for assisting the D-50's MIDI behavior so that its internal sound patches can be used in combination with other devices. The internal cache of the instrument can be cleared to remove artifacts and corrupted data. This is accomplished by pressing the Data Transfer button simultaneously with the 0 button.
However, it is possible that computer programs will still confuse the D-50 with the speed of their transfers. When using Sonar, a popular audio sequencing application, the D-50 responds better when some edits are made to Sonar's TTSEQ.ini file. Change the "SysxSendPacketSize" to 64 in this file and the D-50 will have better chances of properly playing its sound patches.
Synth users often need to send a large supply of sound patches into a synthesizer to customize its internal library of sounds, effects and other settings. The D-50 supports this data, called system-exclusive data, or simply "sysex". Getting the D-50 to properly respond to sysex is not as easy as with modern synths. You must hold down the Data Transfer button when pressing the D-50's load button ("B.LOAD"). Then press Enter to initiate a sysex dump. If, after the bulk loading, the D-50 freezes, simply power cycle the machine by turning it off and back on. The sysex data will usually still be there. This is confirmed by looking at the list of sound patches on the D-50. If they are new, then the dump worked and the sound patches are available for playing.