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 .NET update (0x80073712). Retry the build but not the .NET update, and everything should be fine, according to Microsoft.
The Windows MIDI Services have been floating around for a while now. Pete Brown, Principal Software Engineer for Microsoft’s Developer Platform team, talked about the technology in 2022 and gave updates over the years, including Microsoft opening the MIDI GitHub repo in 2023 and teasing the upcoming tech in October 2024.
At that time, Brown said the Windows MIDI Services would “ship in Windows Insider builds next month.” Almost, but not quite. It has taken until February for the feature to arrive in the Windows 11 Insider Canary Channel. A sensible move as Brown emphasized: “We will have bugs.”
At its core, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a standard for connecting electronic instruments to devices such as computers to play, edit, and record music. Users who dabble in electronic music will therefore welcome the update. However, this is a preview in the Canary Channel, so not everything will work out of the box. Microsoft wants users to report issues and backward compatibility problems with existing hardware and software.
The technology will find its way to the latest supported versions of Windows 10 and 11 at some point in the future – hopefully before October since there won’t be many supported versions of Windows 10 after then.
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?
Then there are the projects to support the tech, one of which is mt32-pi, a work-in-progress bare-metal MIDI synthesizer for the Raspberry Pi 3 and above. It recently went off the rails when the maintainer threw in the towel following what he described as “a sustained campaign of abuse.”
Perhaps silence is golden after all. ®
