MLAN:Firestation Step by Step

From Sonikmatter

Reposted with permission from: http://www.01xray.com/forums/showflat.php?Cat=6&Board=presonus&Number=293501

Thanks to tenorsaxman11

Got my Firestation working. Took days. Here's how. This is on a Dell 700m laptop. It's got a 1394 built in.

I'll start with what didn't work:

1. The original drivers.
2. Upgrading the original drivers.
3. WinXP without SP2.
4. WinXP with SP2 AND all the latest updates.
5. mLan version 1.x

Here's what did work:

1. After all the mess I tried above, I reinstalled windowsXP, downloaded ALL of the windows updates (takes a couple hours) and messed with upgrading the drivers for both my 1394 interface (Texas Instruments, which Presonus or Yamaha said in a post did NOT work, but yes, it does work!).
2. Still had problems! So disregard that step.
3. (or, number one if you want to skip my errors) Reinstall WindowsXP, again.
4. Install JUST your networking driver (either LAN or Wireless), and do windows update, through SP2, but STOP getting the updates once it wants to install a new windows update service. You'll now have SP2, but not about 70 more little updates it gets with the updated installer.
5. Install chipset driver.
6. Install other drivers your machine needs, like video adapters.. BUT don't install sound drivers. I mean, you probably can, but if you're reading this you've probably had problems before, and two devices wanting to handle sound as you install the firestation/mLan drivers isn't make things any smoother.
7. Download mLan 2 installer.
8. Install it. It will tell you that it wants you to plug in the mLan 1394 device (in our case, that's gonna be the firestation) at the very beginning of installation. That's alot different than the process for mLan 1.x. It will walk you through installing something like 5-7 drivers.
9. Use the visual patchbay tool (right-click the little icon in the lower right of your taskbar). If you're not already in the Master/slave layout, press the little yellow icon that sets a Master/slave setup. I think you should probably do this from the wordclock view.
10. Click on the icons of computers in the schematic, it will open up the driver settings. I set both bitrates to 24.
11. Using the visual tool, connect channels 1 through 8 coming out of the firestation device into the inputs of the pc device. I only ran 2 from the pc back into the inputs of the firestation, but I might have to change that later.
12. Bang! You're done... except for setting up your DAW software.
13. Which was simple for me, I'm using sonar. Supposedly Cubase is even easier for talking to the mLan channels. Just set it to use ASIO channels. I setup just four channels (cuz they're stereo), using mLan channels 1, 3, 5, and 7. (got that info from the presonus site). Then in sonar I choose inputs of 1 left, 1 right (each mLan channel is two mono channels for Sonar).

How to do this was scattered all over the internet in various guides and message boards. I'm hoping my trial-and-error and taking the time to aggregate the steps results less hassle for someone out there. Good luck!