[Consortium] Status of FireWire/MLan support?

[Daniel James]

Hello ALSA team,

At the recent Sounds Expo in London, I took the opportunity to talk to 
FireWire interface vendors, and also to Yamaha about MLan.

Regarding FireWire audio in general, the companies were much more 
positive this year, actively talking about working with the Linux 
audio community. I suspect this has a lot to do with a) an increase 
in the level of customers asking about Linux and b) high-profile 
manufacturers, such as Korg, adopting Linux for music devices which 
will quite possibly have built-in FireWire support.

The representative of M-Audio was under the impression that 'the guys 
from SuSE' were working with them on support for the FireWire 410 
product. Is this indeed the case, or are you working under NDA 
perhaps?

Other companies that provided new contacts included Focusrite (they 
now also make a FireWire interface), and the UK distributor of RME 
products. If we can help the ALSA project by passing on these 
contacts, just let me know. (I also have a contact with Behringer 
regarding support for their USB 2.0 interface and control surfaces). 

On the subject of MLan, I was given a contact in the MLan licensing 
department at Yamaha when I enquired if there was some way the 
control node specification could be made available to linuxaudio.org 
members. Last year at Sounds Expo, a representative of Yamaha gave 
the opinion that developers could probably have the specs if they 
asked for them, so it's about time we chased this up.     

Cheers!

Daniel