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