Quote Tim Rainey:

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Yamaha Japan’s unhelpful attitude seems to say they care little once they have your money.

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I'm afraid that's typical of (some) Japanese companies. From a Japanese perspective, admitting there is a problem and resolving it means that the company is guilty, which is a disgrace. That this attitude contradicts with the viewpoint of almost any other culture doesn't matter to them.

The best way to deal with this is coming with clear proof, backed up with arguments, why you think your strategy or vision is better than theirs. It's important to do this in a friendly and polite way, otherwise they'll slam the door shut permanently.

Mind that not all Japanese companies adhere to this policy, but a little respect and friendliness gets you further than just handing them a petition and saying that you are not alone in regretting to see mLan disappear.

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Imagination is more important than knowledge - A. Einstein

As suggested by Blue, Yamaha has delivered on their first promise: They have resumed communication with the Mlan community and within a week of that first promise, they have confirmed that they have regained control of developments of Mlan on the Mac from Apple and have put together the beginnings of a proposal to the user community to update the drivers. The dialog has been excellent over the weekend. You may read more here:

http://www.01xray.com/forums/showflat.php?Cat=7&Board=01X_Macintosh&Number =302546&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1

Other suggestions are being contemplated and discussed with Yamaha and the Mlan on the Mac community. It is quite apparent that Yamaha have decided to take this issue seriously and are working hard to find a compromise with its user base. That is commendable. Obviously only the passage of time will enable us to test the extent of this goodwill. We will keep you posted and endeavour to do so without clogging this forum.

For what its worth, my personal feeling is: I am confident.

Many of the Mlan gurus are cautiously optimistic.

This does not resolve the issue for all the other users of firewire audio interfaces that rely on Apple's firewire audio drivers. This is nothing short of a disgrace for Apple, and I do not doubt that many mac musicians will not forget this.

May Yamaha's initiative serve as an example to other manufacturers who will hopefully realise they must follow suit to honor their commitment to their clients.

Thankyou for your patience this far. Sound on Sound have contributed to this preliminary success also.

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www.christianmccormick.com/Page_7.htm
[size=9]G5Dual2.5,OS10.4.3,RAID300G,3.5G Ram,EdirolUM880,SX3,IvoryPlexHypersonicReason,Yamaha 01X/I88x,Tranzport,Mackie1602...[/size]

Chrismcc, thanks for the 01xray forum link. Having read some (not all) of the thread, I have to say that the replies from Yamaha US look very similar to what I recall of statements made by Yamaha UK when the SW1000XG problem was being discussed. Taken at face value, the statements appear to offer hope of a fix at some unspecified future date… in the case of the SW1000XG, the fix never materialised.

Maybe Yamaha US view Mlan/Mac customers as more ‘pro’ than SW1000XG users so they will try and fix the problems… but I wonder if it is actually Yamaha US or Yamaha Japan that does the work/has the final say.

I wish you luck!


PS Frank, I know the reputation the Japanese have for ceremonially disembowelling themselves rather than suffer what they consider dishonour… in the SW1000XG case though, all my dealings were with Yamaha UK; not that it did any good but I was friendly and polite to them

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Studio: www.kymatasound.com

There are a few things at play here that should be brought up. First, it is unfortunate to some extent that the issues with Apple's currently shipping (OSX.4.8) FWAudio driver and mLAN have been divided. Obviously the mLAN crowd has been quite vocal about pressing Yamaha (as well as Apple) for fixes over the past year. In fact, the Apple FWAudio issues received much deserved extra attention as part of an e-mail campaign and wave of forum posts initiated by the OSX/mLAN community. There was likely some strength in numbers from the two groups being inherently connected. The OSX/mLAN crowd is considerably smaller on their own when separated from the Apple FW crowd, but regardless, the two groups will be looking in different directions for fixes/support from now on.

Everyone who cares about this stuff already knows that Apple is working on fixes to their FWAudio implementation. SOS, Sonicstate, etc. have reported as much, and some manufacturers have been telling their customers to download Apple’s SDK and install the developer’s version of the FWAudio driver. Now that Yamaha has decided to write their own proprietary driver it looks like the race is on… in this case, it would seem that Apple has a head start. On the other hand, and I’ll quote Yamaha_US on this,

“Having seen it even from a distance releasing a computer operating system is a daunting task. Yamaha is just focused on getting a small set of products to work well.”

In other words, Yamaha’s engineers will just be focusing on Yamaha’s products. Apple’s team has a lot more to worry about than just Yamaha gear.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. We all have one thing in common here, and that is to see our firewire audio gear up and running at a professional level. Firewire really has great potential; we just seem to be living through its growing pains.

Mr. Fudd, Elmer, I agree with your sentiments.

What we need is someone with as much energy and dedication as Chris to pursue this thing for an Apple-based solution - to resolve the issues for all 'core-compliant' Firewire interface users . . .

Anyone up to it?

too bad all the owners of Presonus Firestations who got their units fried by the mLan 2.0 update will probably be overlooked in all this....