Andy

mLAN - a brilliant concept from Yamaha to put Midi, Audio and control in one firewire cable. Using drivers, you can connect a PC to this mLAN "network" and stream audio, midi and control data. They started this concept in about 2000, to try and alleviate the bottleneck that was happening with the 1984 MIDI spec. MIDI is very slow, limited channels, and needed an update. mLAN looked to be the saviour.

Unfortunately, Yamaha seemed to have botched the initial launch and the drivers, and never really recovered. Originally, the mLAN spec would be licensed to others so all mLAN-enabled products could speak to each other. It never really caught on.

Interestingly, it seems that the biggest problem was the PC hardware. In my own testing of mLAN, I've found that it's VERY particular about the specific 1394 hardware that you are using on the PC. Because of the driver incompatibilities with some hardware, mLAN was labelled unreliable and a failure. Seems to me, all Yamaha would have had to do was to make an "approved" hardware list, and additionally sell "Yamaha" Firewire interfaces that were guaranteed to work.

I have been using mLAN for a while, and it works ABSOLUTELY PERFECTLY if you have the right PC hardware. Believe me, though, it took a VERY long time for me to find the right hardware. Since there was no (up-to-date) approved hardware list, I had to go by trial-and-error until I found something that works. Of course the mLAN installer doesn't have a test to let you know before you finish the install to let you know whether or not the hardware will work, so the install, testing, is quite a process. You can end up wth flakey operation with a lot of hardware, so you just assume the product is flakey. When in fact, you just have incompatible hardware.

mLAN was the only way to record and play back multitrack audio to/from a PC without a soundcard. Very cool. Now new protocols like AVB and Dante allow multi-track via the LAN connection, but for many years, mLAN was the only way.

Quite a shame, really, that they didn't get the hardware side sorted out before the whole mLAN movement got started. Now Yamaha has dropped all support, and still the product works perfectly well.