It’s been well over a year since Microsoft unveiled it was working on bringing MIDI 2.0 to Windows, and now it’s actually here available for everyone.
We’ve been working on MIDI over the past several years, completely rewriting decades of MIDI 1.0 code on Windows to both support MIDI 2.0 and make MIDI 1.0 amazing. This new combined stack is called “Windows MIDI Services.”
The Windows MIDI Services core components are built into Windows 11, rolling out through a phased enablement process now to in-support retail releases of Windows 11. This includes all the infrastructure needed to bring more features to existing MIDI 1.0 apps, and also support apps using MIDI 2.0 through our new Windows MIDI Services App SDK.
↫ Pete Brown and Gary Daniels at the Windows Blogs
This is the kind of work users of an operating system want to see. Improvements and new features like these actually have a meaningful, positive impact for people using MIDI, and will genuinely give them them benefits they otherwise wouldn’t get. I won’t pretend to know much about the detailed features and improvements listed in Microsoft’s blog post, but I’m sure the musicians in the audience will be quite pleased.
Whomever at Microsoft was responsible for pushing this through, managing this team, and of course the team members themselves should probably be overseeing more than just this. Less “AI” bullshit, more of this.
I think this is one example showing Microsoft is indeed still quite invested in Windows, despite what Thom always claims. Why? Simple, and it’s the same as it always has been: they make money off of every license for every new Windows computer sold, which at the end of the day still makes up the vast majority of the laptop/desktop market. That’s also why they weren’t interested in making Windows 11 run on old devices – there’s no profit in that.
With a bit of course correction, Windows 11 can be great. I’ve been using it for something like 5 years now, and at least for me (admittedly a tinkerer who makes sure to disable as much nonsense as possible) it works. Battery drain while sleeping is still an issue that only seems to be implemented right on Microsoft’s own devices, there are workarounds if you’re willing to sacrifice Secure Boot, but really this should be one of the highest priorities for MS to fix in cooperation with OEMs, since it seriously affects user experience on laptops. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say that I personally needed to tinker more with Windows than I used to with macOS – I tended to install a *lot* of utilities to give me things like good German input on a US keyboard layout, window snapping, and automatic software updating mechanisms. I guess non-technical users still get a slightly less annoying default setup on Mac than on Windows, though the gap seems to be narrowing thanks to Apple’s recent spate of incompetence.
And yes. Linux (Fedora KDE. like Thom) is still what I use when I’m doing basic productivity and I want something lightweight that will prolong my battery life, and it’s what I recommend/ help install for all my friends with old computers for which Windows is unsupported / unperformant. I still get slightly more random glitches and time wasters on Linux than Windows, but they’re mostly minor..
However, Linux lacks support for most DAWs and other commercial music software, and the few companies that attempt to support it (e.g. Presonus) are still doing a half-ass job, with extremely buggy Linux support, officially only for Ubuntu, despite the recent offering of a Flatpak install that should theoretically work everywhere. For most serious musicians, artists and video editors, Linux still doesn’t really have what it takes to even come into consideration.