keppysoftware / winmmwrp

Windows Multimedia Wrapper for OmniMIDI

A group of functions, that allows you to bypass the Windows Multimedia API, thus getting rid of the lag caused by its slow buffer system.

F.A.Q.

What does this do?

Windows Multimedia Wrapper (as the name says), wraps around the default multimedia library in Windows, winmm.dll, and allows users to circumvent the extremely slow buffer that Microsoft has set in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, when using the midiOutShortMsg call.

Why did they make the function slower?

I have no idea really.
Aside from making it slower, the output latency (MIDI app -> MIDI driver) also got worse, since the function seems to make some useless checks on the message, which adds overhead.
I don't know if it's for safety purposes, or they just did something wrong in the function itself.

Was the patch really necessary?

For me and other people, it was.
I really like Black MIDIs, which is a genre of music characterised by its extreme note arts and melodies.
Performance when playing them were okay, when using Windows XP/Vista/7, but Microsoft decided to ruin them on 8.x/10, so we had to find a way around it.
The first iteration of the "wrapper" was literally just copying winmm.dll from Windows 7, and using it on Windows 8.x. That worked fine on everything, until Microsoft decided to make that impossible on Windows 10. Everytime an app tries to load 7's winmm.dll on 10, it'd just throw an error, complaining about a missing ordinal.
For Windows 10, the second iteration was using ReactOS' winmm.dll on Windows 10. That also worked fine, aside from minor issues with the timeGetTime function (Which I fixed in later releases of the file).
Then, I decided to work on a wrapper, which would import the functions from the real Windows Multimedia library (Allowing users to use both Microsoft GS and MIDI input devices), while also getting rid of the lag caused by some weird overhead in midiOutShortMsg (When using my MIDI driver, that is ;P).
Long story short, it was a success. Everything works like it should, and people are happy.

Known bugs

Windows Multimedia Wrapper stock patch

• None, as far as I know.

Windows Multimedia Wrapper DAW patch

• None, as far as I know.

License

See LICENSE.