Ah, mLAN.... those were the days.. did not do a whole lot of music but did have a lot of fun anyway.
I was a heavy mLAN user back in the day, starting with the 01x mixer/audio interface/controller combo and then the i88X and the 01v96 with the mLAN card.
The flexibility afforded by an expanded mLAN setup in terms of the freedom of routing all your IO from all the devices, choosing a clocking scheme, etc. was very ambitious and, once the software settled, it did work very well.
At the same time, it was not a system that was easy to grasp for the novice and I recall a few of us spending long hours on 01xray.com and Mlancentral.com literally what was a lifetime helping other budding users sort out their PC and Mac setups and DAWs with mLAN.
The big mistake for Yamaha and mLAN was the tactical decision to use the Apple Firewire OS X audio streaming driver - as did Apogee and a few others with variable success. Apogee Duet 1 and Ensemble users were similarly irked by the driver issues but eventually did manage to churn out their own beta ahead of the others. There is a lot of speculation on how they managed to do this but that is probably not relevant to this thread at all.
What it did mean for mLAN users was that we were stuck with a driver that had a variable recording offset for what felt like an age and that by the time it arrived most people had given up and sold their kit.
Eventually, Yamaha bought Steinberg, folded mLAN and from then on just used a Yamaha Steinberg FW driver for the newer units (such as the FW interface for the newer Motifs, for example). This meant that Mlan 1 devices like the Firestudio and Mlan 2 devices like the Yamaha ones mentioned above were stuck in OS X 10.5.x for ever after.
Some of the devices such as the mLAN expansion for the Triton and the one for the Kurzweil FX unit - cannot remember the name now - were pretty hard to come by.
I no longer have any of my mLAN kit but I do recall reports that the OS 9 software and drivers did not exhibit any of the traits suffered by the OS X drivers over the lifetime of mLAN.
If I come across a cheap 01x, I may just set it up as a dedicated control surface as it did have an excellent implementation of the Mackie Control protocol. Apart from that, it's a nice little mixer with a couple of Yamaha's well known multiFX units as well as analogue I/O and SPDIF.
Given that Firewire is on a different bus than the PCI slots on my MDD, this would not interfere with my PCI expansion chassis and is worth a shot...
