Thursday was Sangria, last night was beer, tonight I suppose I need to drink Cacaça or something. Last night after a late supper, I ended up finding an Irish pub of all places and drank Guinness to wash out the evil taste of the Spanish beer I had earlier. This place is certainly no Germany.
This morning, went to the conference and some meetings and also walked around the trade show floor. Highlights: Manley had a booth, Dangerous had a working demo of most of their products (can anyone lend me $5500 for a mixing controller?), Yamaha had a PM-1D they were letting people mess with, Audio Prism had a whole load of their $10000 8×8 BridgeCo-based converters (most BridgeCo-based boxes are <$1000 but these boxes are reportedly worth it if you're serious about quality and reliablilty) and that's about all I remember that was especially cool. Lots of companies showing off $proprietary_digital_mixer_and_or_network systems. Ugh. On the bright side, I´m pretty sure I have or can get everything I need to make mLAN work on Linux. Walked the long wy back along the beach after the conference and... that´s about it.
I take it this is AES?
Damn, did I post to my main journal again?
Yeah, I’m on a vacation in Europe anyway so it was pretty easy to head to Barcelona for AES, mainly to meet up with the standards group that does mLAN and other ieee1394 audio stuff. Some of the papers looked interesting but it isn’t worth missing vacation to hear about localization of low frequency sounds or whatever :)
You guys should put mLAN support in the OASYS BTW :)
Heh, do you know? He’s pretty heavy into those mLan standards meetings as well, and I believe he’s at the Barcelona AES, too.
There was an mLan exb for triton, I’m not going to quote you exact numbers, but lets just say the sales for that board were in the low hundreds. Given that, I think you’ll understand why there’s no EXB-mLan for Oasys. Maybe if the market penetration increases future Oasys products will support it, it’s certainly no technical feat to put in a PCI card with ieee1394 and write some linux drivers/rt interfacing to our code.
OK, small world :) I met at the conference. Didn’t know he had an LJ though.
I don’t understand why mLAN has stagnated so much. It’s kind of disappointing because it’s such a promising system. Even Yamaha is putting USB instead of mLAN in some of its digital mixers. Maybe when chipset prices drop, things will improve.. BridgeCo has some silicon coming out that’s much cheaper than the Yamaha stuff. And I’m going to be writing free Linux drivers :)
mLan has two major hurdles to overcome, IMO.
1) Yamaha licensing.
2) perception that installed protocols are “good enough”.
1 could be addressed at any time (and maybe has since the last time I was paying attention?), 2 is a much bigger problem and is inherent in any similar standard as well. The userbase for current MIDI, SPDIF, TOSLINK, etc is huge, and to move to mLan means buying boxes to interchange formats. This is no small expenditure for anyone with a decent-sized rig, and most people take the tact of saying “what I have now works, why should I upgrade to mLan, especially since it’s a standard that may not become ubiquitous?”.
Standards like this really need to be adopted universally and quickly, otherwise caution on the part of the target userbase can prevent it from ever achieving critical mass.