[QuantumNomad_]

> Windows only natively exposes BLE-MIDI through the WinRT API, which almost no DAW polls.

I haven’t used Windows for ages. Does this mean that almost every Windows user with any Bluetooth MIDI keyboard is unable to use it out of the box with their DAW without installing additional third-party software?

Does it apply even to latest version of the very widely used DAWs like Ableton, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Reason, and Reaper?

[mayerwin]

Yes! I was surprised myself it was so complicated, especially as BLE MIDI is not something particularly new (Apple has nailed the implementation much better, luckily Pete at Microsoft is now doing his best to provide a comparable experience). When I played with USB MIDI 25 years ago it felt so much simpler.

[maksut]

That wouldn't surprise me.

Surprisingly Windows audio stack is a mess. I have a mini keyboard with Bluetooth and it was an adventure to get it working in Windows. In Linux it was pretty much plug and play.

Low latency audio drviers are also messy in Windows when not using an audio interface with well written ASIO drivers. Pipewire in Linux is much easier to configure. Looks like MacOS also does not have this driver problem.

It is surprising. Because most audio plugins and DAWs support only Windows and MacOS.

[steve1977]

If you are using Windows professionally for audio, you will be using ASIO. So in practice, this is not really a problem. Especially considering that ASIO drivers often even perform a bit better than their CoreAudio counterparts and don't have hidden doublebuffering.

macOS also seemed or seems to have quite a few problems with DriverKit USB drivers for large channel count interfaces.

[rafabulsing]

In practice it is a problem, because not everyone who needs low latency audio is a professional.

Case in point: just the other week I was trying to get Rocksmith (a guitar game where you plug in an actual guitar with their custom USB cable) working on windows, and I could not do it. The latency was too high for it to be usable.

The community has many workarounds for it, but most involve getting an audio interface and connecting through that. But that really, really shouldn't be needed. I used to play this game on MacOS, and it worked perfectly. It's ridiculous that Windows fails at this.

[harrouet]

If you use a Mac, you'd be amazed at how many things can't be done on Windows without 3rd-party software.

Do you know how to spot a Windows user ? They print-and-scan to merge their PDFs.

[SvenL]

Actually I thought the same for macOS for certain things, like window management was way better on Windows than on macOS (snapping etc.) Luckily after years macOS finally has something decent to organize windows. I know that there were 3rd party apps like rectangles but something simple like organizing windows missing from a desktop OS always felt weird.

[steve1977]

That is a nice function of Preview indeed.

On the other hand, at least since a couple of releases, I have lots of troubles with the highlight annotation in Preview, especially in PDFs with tables. So much so that I have to resort to 3rd party software for that (PDF Expert in my case).

But yeah, PDF support is basically native in macOS since Mac OS X.

[thrtythreeforty]

This is a weird comment because I feel the same about getting macOS to a useable place.

I probably have 5 or 6 things installed on my Mac like Scroll Reverse and Rectangle, just trying to beat the window manager into something that resembles useable.