two or three years ago i've been having my eyes on mLan for feeding audio into a mixer but finally decided optical connections would be simpler for a setup, mainly because i could not find a detailed specification for the (proprietary and patented) mLan.

possibly you just have a conflict or overload on your firewire-bus in case there are also other firewire devices (harddisks?) present.
christian

edit: have you already checked out this site - i just noticed mLan licenses are free now, at least that's the way i'm reading it, and there are certain updates.

I have just one eksternal disk, and its connected to another bus. No other firewire-devices.
Trond

just for technical clearness: are you saying to another bus (like a second firewire card or controller) or just another port (like another connector)?
please note that a single firewire controller can have up to 3 connectors (it is basically working like a hub) - we often noticed that certain firewire-audio-devices don't work properly if connected to the same controller as an external firewire-harddisk (especially if samples are streamed from there)
christian

Its another port [:)]
Trond

The whole Mlan/FW issue is very strange. As I said before in this thread I am using a MOTU 828mkii in order to access VI without the clicks from Logic and my 01x Mlan driver.
The weird thing is I can get the 828 to play fine with Logic + MOTU 828 driver even when it's chained through the 01X (the 01x is connected to the Mac via Mlan Auto Connector), which looks on the face of it to be a potentially disastrous setup.

Hey leuroj
Could it be that MOTU use their own supplied FW-driver and dont use the built-in Apple driver?
Trond

Hi Trond,
Could be; All I know is that MOTU's driver works reasonably well. I think Yamaha have now taken on the future developement of Mlan drivers.
There's still a problem with random offset latency using the 01x and Mlan/Mac.

This is from 01XRay;

"Yamaha announces takeover of mLAN driver development for Mac:
January 12 th 2007 , Hammamatsu , Japan : Responding to continued speculation about the future of mLAN driver development for the Mac platform Yamaha Corporation has released the following statement on 01xRay.com:

Dear valued customers,

With regard to mLAN, which YAMAHA Corporation has proposed to the industry and promoted, we appreciate that many customers are enjoying its convenience under the Windows environment.

As many of you have acknowledged and those who run Intel-based Macs can experience for yourself, on the Windows OS, mLAN is very stable and a vast majority of end users are satisfied with its performance.

As for mLAN on the Mac OS X environment, however, we recognize that some of the performance does not satisfy specific use-cases. In the future, in order to assume more responsibility for the driver's performance and release timetables, the mLAN driver development for the 01X, i88x, mLAN16e and MY16 mLAN will be handled by YAMAHA's own software engineering team and some mLAN driver releases will be done by YAMAHA.

At this time, we are not able to give a definite timetable for release of a new mLAN driver for MAC OS X as we are currently conducting detailed technical investigations to determine the requirements of the new work we must do.

Our current target is for YAMAHA to release its own mLAN driver update for Mac OS X in the summer of 2007 with a major improvement. However this release will probably not include all the improvements we would like to achieve so it will be followed by a series of driver updates as YAMAHA continues it's on going effort to provide the best possible end user experience for our customers.

We have been as open and honest with you in informing you of our current situation. We feel that this open and honest communication is the first step in the process of convincing you that YAMAHA is committed to supporting our customers in an ethical and positive manner. We sincerely appreciate your kind understanding and patience in this matter."

sorry, you posted that before [:)]

i would not recommend to have an audio-device on the same controller (bus) as a harddisk and not at all two audio devices (like motu chained from mLan).

on the firewire bus there are two modes: *normal* chain (device gets assigned an ID and a certain bandwidth of the available 400 Mbit/s) or *live device*, introduced for cameras (device gets all bandwidth it needs).

additionally you should know, that firewire is a serial protocol (only one device can *talk* in a certain time-slice) and each firewire device works as hub (so adding a certain latency to the signal in the chain).

since we all cannot look into the details, we'd have to rely on the compatibility between two devices/drivers ... i would try to add a second firewire-card to the setup and so give each critical device it's own controller.

christian

Hi Christian,
As you say that obviously is not a setup one would recommend, but it works better than the Mlan driver for me.

Is there not some clue to the mystery, in the fact that VI is the only AU, out of many previously listed, that does not work with Mlan.
Is there some special way of addressing the content from disk?
I remember problems initially when NI introduced DFD for Kontakt.

I will try disconnecting all my FW disks leaving only the 01X on the FW bus and VI in Logic adressing the library on the SATA disk, and report back.

Thanks for your help,

Simon.