Many applications rely on MIDI for music synthesis, but much of the MIDI support in Windows has been unchanged for decades. Now, Microsoft is finally addressing this with a robust new framework.
Microsoft has just announced the release of Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27788 to the Canary Channel. Perhaps the biggest improvement here is the public preview of Windows MIDI Services, a completely rewritten MIDI implementation designed to modernize and enhance music creation on Windows. This addition introduces full support for the MIDI 2.0 standard, a major advancement in MIDI technology not seen since its inception in 1983.
The new MIDI Services stack aims to provide a robust foundation for future expansion while addressing long-standing limitations of the original MIDI 1.0 implementation on Windows. Windows MIDI Services embraces this new standard, bringing benefits such as faster data transmission and higher-resolution messages, which results in improved timing and more precise control over musical parameters.
This also includes bi-directional communication. Unlike MIDI 1.0’s one-way communication, MIDI 2.0 enables devices to communicate back and forth, facilitating negotiation and discovery between instruments. Other improvements include better timing and reduced jitter when using USB MIDI devices, and multi-client support where multiple applications can now access a single MIDI device simultaneously. Windows MIDI Services also provides in-service scheduling of outgoing and timestamped incoming messages for enhanced accuracy, and the system now supports app-to-app MIDI routing without the need for third-party software. Finally, Windows can nowe translate between MIDI 1.0 and MIDI 2.0 based on the needs of applications and devices.
Windows MIDI Services is not the only MIDI improvement the next version of Windows 11 will be seeing. Microsoft has partnered with the Association of Musical Electronics Industry of Japan (AMEI) to include a new high-speed USB MIDI 2.0 Class Driver, developed by AmeNote, in this preview. This driver works with both MIDI 2.0 and class-compliant MIDI 1.0 devices. You can manually assign the new driver to any class-compliant USB MIDI 1.0 device to gain its enhanced performance.
And to put the cherry on top, Microsoft has also made Windows MIDI Services and its associated components open-source under the MIT license. The source code, tools, tests, and SDK are now available on GitHub, so if you want to check out that juicy source code, you can also do so. The Windows MIDI Services App SDK, available as a separate, out-of-band release on GitHub, provides developers with the tools needed to create applications that leverage the new MIDI capabilities. Additionally, the SDK includes a desktop application called MIDI Settings, which allows users to manage endpoints, rename devices, create loopback devices, and configure network MIDI 2.0 connections.
MIDI 2.0 has been around for a few years, so it’s nice to see that Microsoft is actually embracing this newer technology on Windows 11 now. It took a while, but we eventually got there. Still, it’ll be a while before this is actually important—to take full advantage of these upgrades, both hardware instruments and DAWs need to add support for MIDI 2.0, and it’s not really widespread yet.
If you’re interested in checking out the many benefits of MIDI Services and MIDI 2.0 at large, you can now download the latest Insider Preview to check this out by yourself. More specifically, if you’re going to try this out, Microsoft wants you to test out the newer MIDI Services with the WinMM MIDI 1.0 API. As we always mention every time we cover a new Insider Preview, we need to mention that unless you’re willing to get down and dirty with pre-release software, you should steer clear from using this on your main machine. All of these MIDI-related changes will eventually land on the mainstream version of Windows, but it might take a while for it to get out of the oven.
Source: Microsoft
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