Renoise 1.9 now supports the new school WDM (DirectMusic) driver model for
MIDI devices to improve MIDI timing.
It was planned to support this under the hood without any configuration
settings, by automatically choosing the driver that gives you the best
timing. Unfortunately this didn’t worked well with the devices that we could
test it on, so we will need some feedback and testing from you to be able to
“finish” this feature.
WDM drivers “allow” better timing, but its not guaranteed that they are
always better than the old drivers (called MME). They sometimes may not
even work at all or result in even worse timing if they are badly implemented.
So, if you have such WDM drivers, it would be really really helpful if you
could give us some feedback about this. If the WDM drivers work as expected
in 99 percent of the cases, we will as planned “just use them”, so that no
one has to explicitly choose them. If not, we have to find a different
solution for that.
Different types of WDM drivers and how you can distinguish them:
-
Emulated WDM drivers. These “wrap” your old MME drivers but are in most
cases totally unusable as they introduce bad timing and a huge latency.
This is why we excluded them. You will no see them in Renoise.
In other software they are shown as for example
“Example MIDI input A [emulated]” -
WDM Software synths. Those are also not supported by Renoise. You also
wont see them in Renoise. -
“Real” WDM drivers which exist next to the MME drivers or replace the MME
drivers.
If they exist beside the MME drivers you will then have 2 different
entries in the MIDI preferences, like:
“Example MIDI input A” This is the MME driver
“Example MIDI input A (WDM)”. This is the WDM driver
You can in most cases not open a WDM driver and non WDM driver side by
side. Either choose the WDM variant everywhere or the non WDM variant.
More details about the devices (which ones are excluded and so on) are
listed in Renoises log.txt.
So if you have such WDM devices, it would be great to know, if:
- They work at all
- They maybe only work in combination with ASIO or DirectSound as the
selected Audio Device in Renoise. - If their timing is really better
To test the timing you could either use MIDI clock (as Slave or Master), or
a MIDI instrument part at high tempo with lots of events.
As the MME driver timing got improved as well, the difference might not be
obvious or noticeable at all, but then its more likely that the WDM driver
timing is more stable (even if you dont here it).
Thanks for any feedback!