Microsoft has been heavily pushing Windows on Arm (WoA) recently because of their AI-powered Copilot capabilities, efficiency, and performance. Many companies including Adobe, Google, and Signal have native apps built specifically for WoA devices. But today, Microsoft has outlined the current state of the OS and what"s coming next. Interestingly, this announcement, in particular, is aimed at a very niche segment, those being musicians leveraging WoA for music creation and live performances.
For starters, Microsoft is hard at work fixing bugs in Windows MIDI Services on WoA, and will be putting them in production versions of the OS soon. It has also been collaborating with a ton of partners building software for music production. Ableton Live is getting a native Arm64 app next year, and others like Bitwig Studio and REAPER are already available. Microsoft has a gigantic list of vendors involved in this category in its lengthy blog post here, which you can peruse at your leisure.
Microsoft is also collaborating with Qualcomm and Yamaha to develop a built-in low-latency USB Audio Class 2 and ASIO driver specifically for WoA hardware. It will have plug-and-play capabilities so any device that is USB Audio Class 2-compliant should "just work". This driver is currently being validated and tested internally, and will be released in public preview next year. This project is already available under a "permissive" MIT license on GitHub so that interested developers can spin off their own variants or improve upon Microsoft"s implementation.
The Redmond tech giant notes that WoA already has a USB Audio Class 2 driver, but it is high latency and does not support all audio endpoints on a device. It doesn"t have native integration with the ASIO protocol either. Since the effort to build the new driver is open-source, Microsoft believes that missing features will be added more quickly.
A public preview for the new driver will be available in 2026 on the Windows Canary Channel, but an ASIO control panel applet may have to be installed via GitHub separately. Microsoft expects this preview to last a long time since the ecosystem is so vast and diverse. That said, do keep in mind that this driver will work on Intel architecture too, even though it is being built primarily with WoA in mind.