Microsoft improves Windows’ update experience, and announces support for MIDI 2.0 and a new audio driver for professionals

Windows 11, version 24H2 represents significant improvements to the already robust update foundation of Windows. With the latest version, you get reduced installation time, restart time, and central processing unit (CPU) usage for Windows monthly updates. Additionally, enhancements to the handling of feature updates further reduce download sizes for most endpoints by extending conditional downloads to include Microsoft Edge. Let’s take a closer look at these advancements.
↫ Steve DiAcetis at the Windows IT Pro Blog

Now this is the kind of stuff we want to see in new Windows releases. Updating Windows feels like a slow, archaic, and resource-intensive process, whereas on, say, my Fedora machines it’s such an effortless, lightweight process I barely even notice it’s happening. This is an area where Windows can make some huge strides that materially affect people – Windows updates are a meme – and it’s great to see Microsoft working on this instead of shoving more ads onto Windows users’ desktops.

In this case, Microsoft managed to reduce installation time, make reboots faster, and lower CPU and RAM usage through a variety of measures roughly falling in one of three groups: improved parallel processing, faster and optimised reading of update manifests, and more optimal use of available memory. We’re looking at some considerable improvements here, such as a 45% reduction in installation time, 15-25% less CPU usage, and more. Excellent work.

On a related note, at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit, Microsoft also unveiled a number of audio improvements for Windows on ARM that will eventually also make their way to Windows on x86. I’m not exactly an expert on audio, but from what I understand the Windows audio stack is robust and capable, and what Microsoft announced today will improve the stack even further. For instance, support for MIDI 2.0 is coming to Windows, with backwards compatibility for MIDI 1.0 devices and APIs, and Microsoft worked together with Yamaha and Qualcomm to develop a new USB Audio Class 2 Driver.

In the company’s blog post, Microsoft explains that the current USB Audio Class 2 driver in Windows is geared towards consumer audio applications, and doesn’t fulfill the needs of professional audio engineers. This current driver does not support the standard professional software has standardised on – ASIO – forcing people to download custom, third-party kernel drivers to get this functionality. That’s not great for anybody, and as such they’re working on a new driver.

The new driver will support the devices that our current USB Audio Class 2 driver supports, but will increase support for high-IO-count interfaces with an option for low-latency for musician scenarios. It will have an ASIO interface so all the existing DAWs on Windows can use it, and it will support the interface being used by Windows and the DAW application at the same time, like a few ASIO drivers do today. And, of course, it will handle power management events on the new CPUs.
↫ Pete Brown at the Dev Blogs

The code for this driver will be published as open source on GitHub, so that anyone still opting to make a specialised driver can use Microsoft’s code to see how things are done. That’s a great move, and one that I think we’ll be seeing more often from Microsoft. This is great news for audio professionals using Windows.