> > What about Yamaha's mLan ? > > I thought that was some kind of midi over firewire, > > but maybe they didn't grab it as an opportunity > > to improve on midi ... > > It's midi and audio over firewire. > I think it's plain vanilla midi messages, though. > not sure.
mLAN is built on top of the public IEC61883 protocols, specifically IEC61883-6 which (I believe) specifies audio and plain midi transport over ieee1394 (aka firewire). It does not venture into better control protocols, it is just midi. mLAN adds (at least) word clock (sync and recovery, low jitter and so on and so forth) and connection management to the public standards, but it is a proprietary system - you can get a license only after signing an NDA, I believe an open source driver would not be possible given those constraints. At a recent talk about mLAN here at ccrma I asked the question: so, how would an mLAN product interact with a completely IEC61883-6 compliant protocol stack in, let's say, linux? After all, it is built on top of that. They did not know. At that time it was a theoretical question, now it is a practical one as I just noticed last week that in 2.4.19-rc2 there is now an option to compile a IEC61883-6 protocol stack module for ieee1394.... so I'll ask the question again... -- Fernando