back to article Microsoft makes sweet, sweet music with Windows MIDI Services

Microsoft has released its first in-box public preview of Windows MIDI Services with full support for the MIDI 2.0 standard. The preview is part of build 27788 of the Windows 11 Insider Preview Canary Channel, which, as if to emphasize its bleeding edge nature, includes a known issue: a 0x8007000d install error and a failed . …

  1. MrKrotos

    Cutting Edge Crap

    Way too late Microsoft! Your OSs are rubbish for music production now, Apple is far better!

    This is what happens when you ignore your users for years.... They go somewhere else!

    1. MyffyW Silver badge

      With apologies to AudioPilz

      Welcome to Bad Gear - the show about the worlds most hated audio tools

      At first glance Microsoft's embrace of native MIDI is ticking all the "our heart was never in this" boxes, coming as it does 40 (yes Four-Zero) years after the release of the AtariST

    2. katrinab Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Cutting Edge Crap

      Unless you need > 192GB RAM, in which case Apple no longer has anything to offer you. The old Intel Mac Pro maxed out at 1.5TB.

      But yes, while on paper, my Threadripper should beat the pants off my 16” Intel MacBook pro, in reality it is the other way round when it comes to real-time audio stuff, and also real-time video processing. The Threadripper is much better at batch processing workloads.

    3. simonlb Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Cutting Edge Crap

      And this service will be just as reliable as all the other ones in Windows which arbitrarily disappear for no reason / insist no device is plugged in even when device manager shows it is there / just stop working and require a full removal and reinstall to resolve. And don't forget the configuration settings for this service will be collectively over four different screens with only the basic one being relatively east to access with the others all hidden in different submenus.

      Microsoft, why are you even bothering?

  2. 42656e4d203239 Silver badge

    Your computer needs an update.. please wait whilst we...

    ...trash your Midi setup in the middle of a live concert.

    Yeh. That's going to play well (see what I did there?).

    What ever happened to Fairlight?

    1. David 132 Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: Your computer needs an update.. please wait whilst we...

      >What ever happened to Fairlight?

      One of the best cracking groups on the Amiga warez scene and fondly remembered here at least!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Your computer needs an update.. please wait whilst we...

      >What ever happened to Fairlight?

      Morphed into fully fledged PP/DAW solution, was bought by BlackMagic Design in 2016 and is now built into DaVinci Resolve (which runs great on Win, Mac or Rocky).

    3. Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

      Re: Your computer needs an update.. please wait whilst we...

      Fairlight went tits up because the CMI was entirely hand built from custom parts. Even retailing at over £100k, they lost money.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Your computer needs an update.. please wait whilst we...

        >Fairlight went tits up because the CMI was entirely hand built from custom parts.

        Fairlight was sold for an eye watering sum, certainly didn't go tits up. You're probably thinking of Peter Vogel Instruments - which he span out after leaving the co.

    4. Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

      Re: Your computer needs an update.. please wait whilst we...

      trash your Midi setup in the middle of a live concert

      I remember a James gig at Manchester Arena, they had unusually long pauses between some of the songs and Tim Booth started taking the piss out of Mark Hunter, their keyboard player, because he'd recently moved from Mac to Windows...

  3. Irongut Silver badge

    Welcome to the 1980s

    Did I step into a time machine this morning?

    1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Welcome to the 1980s

      Not this morning, no. Perhaps you did in 40 years time though ;-)

    2. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: Welcome to the 1980s

      I hear next they are going to support paper tape readers.

  4. Omnipresent Silver badge

    They started working on it

    in 2022, and haven't got midi right?

    1. MrKrotos

      Re: They started working on it

      They should have sorted out ASIO also but...

      1. Omnipresent Silver badge

        Re: They started working on it

        and OSC protocol as well.

        we are all going to die.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm.

    "Having inbox MIDI 1.0 and 2.0 drivers means the end of badly written OEM drivers."

    "We will have bugs"

    So, I must conclude

    "Having inbox MIDI 1.0 and 2.0 drivers means the start of badly written MS drivers."

    1. Someone Else Silver badge

      From the article:

      Users who dabble in electronic music will therefore welcome the update.

      Uhhh, not fricking likely! I have a rather esoteric mix of MIDI-enabled hardware and software, and the last damn thing I need is for Micros~1 to come in and fuck it all up. Which they will do, of course, with the reckless abandon of a 2 year old with a spray paint can. I mean, it's not like they don't have form with this....

      And as others have mentioned, 40 years late?!? WTF,Micros~1? Is it that you suddenly discovered that you can't slurp MIDI information with the existing, working, 3rd party stuff that is currently out there? Or that you have stumbled upon a heretofore undiscovered target for embrace, extend, extinguish?

      1. Wally Dug
        FAIL

        Feature-rich Operating System?

        "The Internet? No, it won't come to anything, let's not bother with it."

        "MIDI? No, it won't come to anything, let's not bother with it."

        "Privacy? Security? No, they won't come to anything, let's not bother with them."

      2. Locomotion69 Bronze badge

        I have a decent setup for my MIDI equipment, powered by an ancient Win98 laptop.

        It has a decent driver for my Yamaha Interface, which works fine for the last 25 (!) years, and system latency is neglectible.

        Fair enough, I will give it a try, but my expectations are extremely low related its "useability" for me.

  6. Mentat74
    Facepalm

    "canary channel"...

    We all know what happens to canaries in a coalmine don't we ?

    How long before your MIDI gets routed through 'A.I.' ?

    1. Omnipresent Silver badge

      Re: "canary channel"...

      The psycotrance edm scene went full A.I. around the time of the "fury road" soundtrack. I've said it before, but the music industry was the first to battle A.I.

      Want to know why it all sucks so bad now? Nobody is playing anything even if they can. It's not that musicians can't play, or that they have no imagination, it's that the entertainment industry went "content" driven in the early 2000's. It became simple to push out 10-12 projects a day with the help of A.I. That became their jobs as "creators".

      The kids latched onto it of course. It became their generations "sound". It was all they knew, and as younger people tend to do, they think they are smarter than everyone else. When the early ones made some quick cash at the top of the pyramid scheme, others wanted to desperately do the same.

      I come from another generation. We had a saying, "fuxk the fame, give me the money." This generation had to deal with "fame is money". That too became a weapon, as now the "entertainment" industry is having to defend themselves against the A. I. theft.

      I see a resurgence in the underground. People are getting back to their roots now. They all want that "underground sound" in an attempt to separate themselves. The music industry has been dealing with this longer.

    2. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: "canary channel"...

      It's only a matter of time before "AI" can replicate bum notes, a pissed-up off-tempo drummer, and the sound of a drug-addled vocalist tripping and breaking a rib on his own microphone stand. All you need is the sticky floor and a drunken teenager barging into you and spilling your stale beer in a plastic pint glass, and you've got the whole experience at home.

      1. Handlebars

        Re: "canary channel"...

        Sounds like a few scenes from Weird Science that didn't make it into the final cut.

    3. David 132 Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: "canary channel"...

      I misread it as "Canyon channel", which in a MIDI context, for Windows users of a certain age, brings back Proustian memories!

  7. Omnipresent Silver badge

    For the pat 20 years or so I've been convinced that success depends on whether or not you are young enough to take your shirt off.

  8. IGotOut Silver badge

    There was a reason Atari dominated...

    ...it wasn't just the fact it had built in ports, it's also the timing was damned good for the time.The PC, even with the best cards, couldn't get close.

    Then the Falcon030 came along and completely and utterly obliterated anything the PC could manage. It took years for the PC to get even close.

    1. david 12 Silver badge

      Re: There was a reason Atari dominated...

      The PC/XT put the keyboard near the top in the interrupt list, so the keyboard was the low-latency device. Digital signal processors and other sound cards were as good as the one built into the Falcon030, but with a multi-tasking operating system and a different hardware priority order, timing driven by an application program was never going to be as tight -- you need to offload all the timing tasks into the sound card to get very low latency, But downloading the timing sequence into the card is not what you want for a primary / master control system driving other devices, where the whole point is to drive sequences that are long and effectively irregular.

  9. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
    Trollface

    Move and break things fast

    Updating .NET breaks the code. So much for backward compatibility. This is the reason why I abandoned ASP.NET Core Yadda after a very short time: I simply don't want to rewrite a great deal of the base code every time there's a .NET library update and some Bozo at Microsoft decided it's time to rework the code model yet again.

  10. Dvon of Edzore

    Later than usual, eh Mikey?

    Huh? My MPU-401 worked before there was a Windows. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is using Ethernet-based audio routing protocols like AES50, AES67, Dante, Livewire, RAVENNA, and others designed in THIS century - working across the stage or across multiple oceans. Even the stage lighting moved past slow protocols like MIDI a long time ago.

    1. Sandgrounder

      Re: Later than usual, eh Mikey?

      MIDI has never been used for routing audio because that isn't what it does.

      MIDI is just as relevant today in connecting and controlling musical instruments as it ever was. It is used everywhere from the smallest home setup to the largest stadium gigs. For a 40 year old protocol, it is doing rather well.

      Like the wheel, good inventions don't age.

  11. Crhys

    Time Machine, set the controls

    "We will have bugs."

    Yeah, you definitely will. At least you are blatantly admitting it (MicroShaft can't get midi working in 2025)!

    "MIDI can be a contentious technology. For every computer fan left agog from hearing The Secret of Monkey Island theme through MT-32 hardware, there are dozens bruised by playground squabbles over which is better – the Atari ST and its built-in MIDI capabilities or the Commodore Amiga and its superior graphics?"

    Wtf?! Is that a joke? Was this written in 1985? Midi was brilliant and still does what it says on the tin (same for OSC). Who the heck is having problems with midi these days?

    "Having inbox MIDI 1.0 and 2.0 drivers means the end of badly written OEM drivers."

    Oh, like RME, Focusrite, and all the rest?

    "...so not everything will work out of the box. Microsoft wants users to report issues and backward compatibility problems with existing hardware and software."

    Ha ha, hahaha, the joke is on you, the midi user who falls for this crap.

    As already commented- MicroShaft should have had midi, OSC, and ASIO straightened out decades ago. It's not some kind of brain surgery, rocket science.

  12. EricB123 Silver badge

    Now, I want Win 11

    I guess MS will try anything to get Win 10 users to upgrade,

  13. Cloudseer

    Guys MIDI 2.0 is a 2020 revision and the protocol is how almost all music hardware communicates.

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