Windows MIDI and Music dev

All about MIDI and other music creation app developer topics.

Latest posts

Feb 4, 2026

Windows MIDI Services rollout – known issues and workarounds

Pete Brown

This is just a quick post here to assist users with known issues or workarounds, in the interest of remaining transparent on this project. Main Windows MIDI Services Announcement blog post The issues and workarounds here apply only to the new Windows MIDI Services rollout in Windows 11 retail 24h2 and 25h2. This does not apply to older versions of Windows. Insider builds get different releases on a different schedule so this information may or may not apply to a Windows Insider Canary/Dev/Beta release. We performed a ton of testing with customers, partners, and our own equipment over the development cycle ...

Nov 12, 2025

Fall 2025 Windows Musician Technology and Arm64 Update

Pete Brown

It's no surprise that Arm64 PCs hit a sweet spot for music creation and live performance. They are thin and light, have excellent battery life (I used a Surface Laptop 7 at the entire NAMM show and never had to charge it despite giving presentations and demos), great screens, USB-4 ports that support Thunderbolt 3, and are super quiet. They continue to get even more powerful, as seen during Snapdragon Summit this year with the announcements around Snapdragon X2 Elite, including the 18 core, 5 GHz Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. The Snapdragon X Elite Arm64 PCs have impressed me so much over the past year and a half...

Nov 7, 2025

Windows MIDI Services and the 10-MIDI driver limit

Pete Brown

The USB MIDI 1.0 specification was released in the late 90s around the same time that PCs were starting to move from rectangular beige boxes to things like fake-silvered bulbous plastic shapes. At this point, some of the code in Windows to support USB MIDI 1.0 has become intergenerational – it's certainly older than my teenagers here at home. There have been updates over the years, but the core has remained largely the same. Currently, the WinMM / MME APIs that so many apps use rely on device enumeration (that is, discovery and listing of MIDI-capable devices) code in the Windows Audio Endpoint Builder service, ...

Nov 6, 2025

Troubleshooting recent MIDI issues in Windows 11 (and Windows 10)

Pete Brown

If you are on Windows 11 (or Windows 10 for the UAD issue) and recently had either of these two issues, please read on: Universal Audio Console problem Recently, Universal Audio released a version of their Console app which broke MIDI on Windows. If you use a UAD audio interface and found your MIDI devices unavailable in your DAW, or saw an "out of memory" or similar error in MIDI utilities, this may be what you have run into. Universal Audio quickly released an update to their Console which fixes this issue, so if you are up to date with your UAD Console updates, you should no longer see this issue. ...

Feb 5, 2025

Announcing: Windows MIDI Services Customer Preview 1!

Pete Brown

Today, we're releasing the latest version of Windows MIDI Services to the Windows Insider Canary Channel, fully enabled for anyone to evaluate. We recommend this for technical users (as with any Canary release) and not for production use because we will have bugs. You can learn more about the Insider release here. The Windows Insider blog post details what's in this release and in the associated Windows MIDI Services App SDK. Here are some more details. The Windows Insider Canary Channel is provided for testing and evaluation on non-production PCs. Please see the Windows Insider blog post for additional info...

Nov 8, 2024

Which compilation target should I pick for my Arm64 music apps, ASIO components, and plugins?

Pete Brown

The Windows music creation community today is centered around Intel/AMD x64 (x86-64) because that is what most Windows PCs run for some time now. The introduction of Arm64 Copilot+ PCs has provided new opportunities with efficient and powerful devices with great battery life and NPUs. But because we continue to support both the AMD/Intel x86-64 (x64) and Arm64 devices and instruction sets, and are not forcing a move to one or the other, developers need to make some decisions about how to target their code to maximize compatibility and minimize development and support work. Windows 11 includes x64 emulation built...

Oct 21, 2024

Windows MIDI Services October 2024 Update

Pete Brown

It's been a little while since I last posted an update about Windows MIDI Services outside of our Discord Server, but we've been busy! With all the announcements today at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, I thought I'd dive in a bit on where we are with our new MIDI 1.0 and MIDI 2.0 stack on Windows. For more information on what we announced for musicians at Snapdragon Summit this week, check out this blog post Make Great Music with Windows on Arm. What's MIDI? Not everyone reading this is familiar with MIDI as it applies to musicians. So a brief explanation is in order. MIDI: The original standard MIDI (Mus...

Oct 21, 2024

Make Great Music with Windows on Arm

Pete Brown

This week has been amazing, with our musician work really coming together at Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2024! There's only so much time available in a keynote, so I thought I'd expand a bit more on the music-related announcements, especially for the new in-box features. Music is all around us. We purposefully listen to music in our cars and homes and concerts, we hear it in stores and public places, and in larger cities, often on street corners. We hear it when we view shows on streaming services, or TV. Music plays when many of our devices boot up. It's in ads. It's in interstitial content. When I was in Tokyo,...