Virtual Device App

Property	Value
Abstraction Id	{8FEAAD91-70E1-4A19-997A-377720A719C1}
Mnemonic	APP

Overview

One way to have app-to-app MIDI on Windows is to use a simple loopback. That is typically created ahead of time, and is available for any applications to use to communicate with each other. The lifetime of these loopback endpoints are not tied to any one application. They are simply a pipe between applications.

Another approach is to allow applications to create and publish an endpoint which is declared through settings inside the application itself. When the application closes, the endpoint closes. That is the model the Virtual Device App feature implements. (If you want the simple pre-created loopback, see the Virtual Loopback transport)

In addition, MIDI 2.0 has additional requirements for endpoints. They need to be able to participate in the MIDI Endpoint Discovery process, and respond with appropriate endpoint capabilities and preferred settings. The Virtual Device App makes that configuration simple for application developers and musicians.

Suggested Uses

This is the right kind of endpoint to create if you have an application which operates as a synthesizer, tone generator, or an input device, and you want the app to act and be seen in the same way a piece of MIDI hardware would be seen.

Today, the API provides support for MIDI 2.0 / UMP protocol. In the future, we’ll add MIDI CI and other capabilities to these virtual devices (today, those need to be done manually or through a third-party library).

Configuration

Because this type of endpoint is tied to the runtime of an application, it can be created only through the API by creating a MidiVirtualDeviceDefinition and calling the appropriate MidiSession methods to create and open the endpoint. This is not something that a MIDI user will pre-create in the settings app or configuration file.