I’d like to know if anyone is using an mLAN enabled product with Ardour?
I have a Yamaha 01V96, and have been thinking about getting the mLAN expansion card and using this as my audio interface for recording into Ardour. This would give me access to 16 channels of 24/96k audio, as well as MIDI.
I’ve searched for info on mLAN compatibility with Linux, but have not come up with much. Just a statement on Yamaha’s mLAN central site that says Linux compatibility is coming, and a few blurbs about it working in 2.4 kernel, but not 2.6.
I know it’s not much help but the stuff at http://mlanalsa.sourceforge.net/ has very much the look of not being touched for a few years. From a cursory glance I can’t tell whether it’s just a matter of fixing it to work with a modern ALSA core or not.
If you do a bit a searching, you will find that both Paul and Steve Harris were very interested about this back in 2000-2001 and were talking about developing an ALSA driver for it.
Nowdays, I don’t think an ALSA driver would be the best approach. A better solution would be to try to convince the people developing Jack to create a mLAN backend for jack. You might consider proposing that in on the Jack-dev mailing list. If would provide an excellent interface between software and hardware consoles. I’m sure the overhaul of the IEEE1394 stack currently taking place in the Linux kernel would make development less messy as well.
Yeah, I took a look at the code on sourceforge and came to the opinion that there would be more work than I could be bothered with to get it to work with a modern ALSA core/Linux Kernel (I don’t have an mLan device so don’t really have the motivation.) I guess however there is some good stuff in the code there with regards to handling the protocol though.
Sorry to bump up such an old thread but is anybody up to speed with the situation on mlan and ardour/linux? I’d like to work towards being able to use my Yamaha 01x with Ardour. There are many Yamaha 01x or other mLan product users that were disappointed with the lack of Windows 7/64-bit drivers and I’m sure that if I can get mlan working on Ubuntu then that might help people start using their old hardware again. I tried contacting the author of Linux ALSA-AMDTP Module but that seems like an abandoned project and I’ve gotten no response so far. I think if I work hard enough I can get the driver working.
I know it’s been a while, but I was just wondering if there has been any movement on this? I’d be quite interested in getting mLAN to work with JACK/Ardour.
@brucebertrand: mLAN continues to be undocumented protocol. to me, that is a an easy way to define “not worth the time and effort that would be required to reverse engineer it”. Yamaha failed to follow through on their idle chatter about open sourcing mLAN in the early 2000’s, and so there we are. to be more precise, the data transport parts of mLAN became IEEE 61883, which is what FFADO/Freebob/Bebob and several other audio-over-iirewire systems are based on for data transport. But the part of mLAN that remains (the so-called “discovery” protocol so that devices know that they exist and what they can do) has never been documented. This is a big, big part of the reason why Bridge Co. originally created BeBox, which provides its own discovery protocol and has subsequently been extended and superceded to a limited extent by the stuff now supported by FFADO.
I’m all for well documented and open standards, but I also have a 01x sitting here and I wanna use it. That aside, extending the life of old hardware is part of what GNU/Linux has always been about. I’m gonna give it a shot and see how it goes anyway.
@faberman: No slot for an expansion board on the 01x but will see if I can solder one in.
There are ygdai expansion boards for ADAT, MADI, AES, just to name a few open standards with well supported interface cards on linux. Forget proprietary crap.
@audiophile: the situation has not changed since my post on 2010-05-29 and there is no reason to believe that it will. As Faberman said, I encourage you to forget proprietary, undocumented “standards” and favor technology that can (and even better has) been implemented by multiple vendors. ADAT, MADI, AES are good examples of this. BeBox/DiceII are not quite as good, but given both Bridge Co and TC Electronics attitudes towards Linux support of their technology, I think we could probably include the basics of firewire audio using those technologies to be in the same group (“not proprietary crap”) too.