How to connect Ardour via Firewire to synthesiser (S90 ES)

Installation & Configuration Mac OS X
#1

Hi

My synthesiser (Yamaha S90 ES) needs “MLan” to connect to the DAW, and MLan’s been discontinued.
I’ve been trying to find information about any hardware evolutions, alternatives, or work-arounds, that will allow the DAW and the synthesiser to communicate.

A Wikipedia article says, “With the proper driver software, a computer-based digital audio workstation can interact with mLAN-compliant hardware via any OHCI-compliant FireWire port”.

En route to trying to figure what-all this statement means, I’m stopping by here to ask if anyone else has found a solution to this problem.

For now, I can record music from the synthesiser to the computer via a mixer that’s fairly ‘low-latency’, but I’d prefer to play directly to the computer.

This question doesn’t pertain to MIDI/VST via USB, that’s a different matter. I want to play audio from the synthesiser into the computer, and according to this Wikipedia article, there’s a way for the Digital Audio Workstation to help this happen.

Thanks for any advice.

#2

@MacLustre: mLAN consists of two parts. one is a protocol for moving audio and MIDI data via firewire and was eventually codified into iec61883, an industry “standard” for this that is used by many firewire audio devices. the second is a discovery mechanism that allows different mLAN devices to find each other on a firewire bus/chain.

the specifications for the discovery part have never been released in a way that would allow them to be implemented in open source.