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it's very unfortunate that non-musicians associate MIDI mostly with Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth. even admitting that General MIDI specifically was never great, Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth is really not a good General MIDI synth…
imagine if Windows shipped with a high-quality GM2 synth instead. or a high-quality GS synth, for that matter… but those standards are both obsolete in this century, and at this point, I don't think Microsoft care.
a little bird told me that they were considering removing Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth as part of their MIDI 2.0 push. i'm glad they didn't do that. but imagine what could be if they added a better synth alongside it. oh well.
microsoft i am begging you to phone up roland or yamaha and drop some amount that would be peanuts to you on a license for one of their old vsts
the worst thing is that Microsoft themselves have made a somewhat better synth: DirectMusic (part of DirectX). i don't know why they made the default Windows synth suck and only use the better one in games. maybe it was too much for an average 1996 office PC.
uuuuu i really have to write that blog post or make that youtube video don't i. there's just… so much misunderstanding about this topic because most people haven't been cramming their head full of knowledge about obsolete standards for the last year and a half of their life
@hikari I strongly suspect that the reasoning was related to Microsoft at the time being a number of smaller organisational units that were even more hostile to each other than they were to competitors outside the company.
@hikari I feel like Microsoft might actually have an incentive to do bug compatibility now? Like what if they upgrade their general midi and then people want to go back and listen to In the Hall of the Mountain King.RMI and it DOESN'T SOUND LIKE THEY REMEMBER
@mcc yes i'm glad they didn't drop MSGS because it'd be bad for compatibility. but a better synth alongside it as an option, perhaps triggered by a sysex (MSGS never supported General MIDI 2, so a GM2 Reset would be an obvious way to activate a better synth) would be nice
@mcc of course i'm sure a bunch of people out there wrote MIDI files with GM2 software and only tested on MSGS, so… maybe even that is a bad idea
@hikari Maybe this will just inexplicably show up one day in PowerToys
