[sdiy] ADDA & MIDI over Ethernet/Firewire?

[proteus at ugwarehouse.org]

>> > Has anyone come up with a conversion box that does
>> > AD/DA and transmits the digital audio over either Ethernet or
>> firewire?
>>
>> There _are_ mLan interface chips out on the marketplace, so go hunting
>> and see what you find (from memory they do mLan<-->MIDI or mLan<-->audio
>> chips).
>>
>>Neil

Yamaha makes a few chips, but you have to become an mLan licensee (free of
charge, I signed up to be able to use the chips in some products) in order
to buy them. They're not cheap... about $20-$50 depending on which ICs you
want. They have three chips: The PH-1, the PH-2, and the NC-1. PH-1 and
PH-2 are just FireWire PHY chips, they need an external microcontroller,
MAC chip, and firmware (which Yamaha can provide information and code
for). The NC-1 is an integrated solution.

Here's what you get:

PH-1: 8in/8out audio up to 48kHz Fs and 2xMIDI ports.
PH-2: 32in/32out audio up to 48kHz Fs (16i/o up to 96kHz) and 4xMIDI ports
NC-1: 8in/8out audio up to 48kHz Fs and 4xMIDI ports.

All chips can be cascaded up to 4x, so you can have up to 128x audio ports
@ 48kHz. All chips have IIS and serial I/O for MIDI, as well as various
parallel I/F formats to connect to DSPs.

Don't worry about any NDAs... this is all public info. You can grab more
info on mLan here:

http://www.yamaha.co.jp/tech/1394mLAN/english/

Regarding MaGIC... beyond its historical problems, I've heard that it
hasn't worked well in the field beyond one or two instruments. It's going
to suffer more problems than mLan due to its flakiness.

If anyone has any questions about mLan, I'd be more than happy to answer
all that I can.

Best Regards,

Joe Grisso