This looks like it might bring windows on par with OSX for MIDI, but while windows has that terrible driver architecture that allows for one hardware driver to interrupt another hardware driver I'm afraid audio will always be second to OSX.
These "Deferred procedure calls" are ever present and make windows audio completely unpredictable. Having random audio buffer underruns because your video card decided to do something that stopped the OS from sending data to your sound interface is really a big problem.
If you would have made this comment 20 years ago, I would have agreed. Nowadays, I'm not so sure about the superiority of Apple for audio use, I think it's mostly a myth and Apple is resting on its laurels.
For example, there's quite a few cross platform DAWs (e.g. Cubase) which perform better on macOS than Apple's first party DAW Logic Pro. And features like ARA2 are still broken in Logic 12 on Apple Silicon.
There are many studios running just fine on Windows. Where Apple still is popular probably is songwriters and producers, mainly because they have nice laptops.
Also, when Apple introduced their Apple Silicon architecture and their new DriverKit, they had huge performance issues with USB audio interfaces. Basically exactly like what you blame Windows for. I'm actually not even sure if this has been fully fixed by Apple in Tahoe (but I think it has improved). But I think people still have issues with USB 3 interfaces with a large channel count, devices like a RME UFX III for example. Things are better via Thunderbolt, as this bypasses Apple's USB architecture.
For the DPC problem, Windows has the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service, which helps a bit (but doesn't fully solve the problem).
Lastly, Microsoft has been quite open in communication recently, for example one of the authors of the article linked is active in various audio engineering forums.
This is a refreshing contrast to Apple to be honest, which are always very secretive and seem to have the attitude that Apple cannot do wrong. So if there are problems like the above mentioned USB issue or the ARA2 issue with Logic, you never actually hear something official.
This sounds exciting and it seems to be enabled on my Windows installation (checked with their tool).
But where do I go from here? Is there something usable for the end user (like the settings app they mention) or is it developers-only for now? How do I use it with my Ableton + external setup?
Yup, has been for a while but it seems a lot of people were waiting for the dust to settle with Windows support. With that now released and the APIs locked down, there are some things starting to happen, such as JUCE now supporting MIDI 2.0.
This looks like it might bring windows on par with OSX for MIDI, but while windows has that terrible driver architecture that allows for one hardware driver to interrupt another hardware driver I'm afraid audio will always be second to OSX.
These "Deferred procedure calls" are ever present and make windows audio completely unpredictable. Having random audio buffer underruns because your video card decided to do something that stopped the OS from sending data to your sound interface is really a big problem.
https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/solving-dpc-la...
If you would have made this comment 20 years ago, I would have agreed. Nowadays, I'm not so sure about the superiority of Apple for audio use, I think it's mostly a myth and Apple is resting on its laurels.
For example, there's quite a few cross platform DAWs (e.g. Cubase) which perform better on macOS than Apple's first party DAW Logic Pro. And features like ARA2 are still broken in Logic 12 on Apple Silicon.
There are many studios running just fine on Windows. Where Apple still is popular probably is songwriters and producers, mainly because they have nice laptops.
Also, when Apple introduced their Apple Silicon architecture and their new DriverKit, they had huge performance issues with USB audio interfaces. Basically exactly like what you blame Windows for. I'm actually not even sure if this has been fully fixed by Apple in Tahoe (but I think it has improved). But I think people still have issues with USB 3 interfaces with a large channel count, devices like a RME UFX III for example. Things are better via Thunderbolt, as this bypasses Apple's USB architecture.
For the DPC problem, Windows has the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service, which helps a bit (but doesn't fully solve the problem).
Lastly, Microsoft has been quite open in communication recently, for example one of the authors of the article linked is active in various audio engineering forums.
This is a refreshing contrast to Apple to be honest, which are always very secretive and seem to have the attitude that Apple cannot do wrong. So if there are problems like the above mentioned USB issue or the ARA2 issue with Logic, you never actually hear something official.
This sounds exciting and it seems to be enabled on my Windows installation (checked with their tool).
But where do I go from here? Is there something usable for the end user (like the settings app they mention) or is it developers-only for now? How do I use it with my Ableton + external setup?
The documentation I found is not very clear: https://microsoft.github.io/MIDI/
Has MIDI 2.0 even been finished yet?
Yup, has been for a while but it seems a lot of people were waiting for the dust to settle with Windows support. With that now released and the APIs locked down, there are some things starting to happen, such as JUCE now supporting MIDI 2.0.
Ah okay, I remember reading that they're still adding to the protocol but that was a couple of years ago.
Great, I am looking forward to trying this out.