I just wanted to post this in case it might be helpful to someone. I got my motif es8 with mLAN working on windows 8 64 bit. My setup is pretty simple so I’m not sure how this would translate for other setups.

I have a desktop with a gigabyte motherboard and a Texas Instruments built in firewire chip.

I have a motif es8 with an mLAN16E card, and plg150 cards AN, DX and VL.

The complicated part is installing unsigned drivers on windows 8. The yamaha mlan 64 drivers are not signed so to install these drivers windows has to be in test mode and kept this way for mlan to work. I don’t use this computer for anything else so this is no issue for me.

I also got to install studio manager, motif es voice editor, multi part editor, AN editor, DX editor and VL simple editor. All these work fine with the latest versions in windows 8 64.

I did some recording tests with cubase 7 elements 64 bit and the audio part works just fine. The midi part has some issues.

What works:

-mlan audio
-mlan midi port 1 and port 2. Recording midi with a plg card or the normal sounds of the ES in song mode worked just fine.

What doesn’t work correctly:

-mlan midi port 3 and 4, so controlling cubase with the motif gets the midi parts mixed up in mlan.

Finally I tested the usb 64 drivers for the motif ES and these worked fine. So if I wanted to work with midi and control cubase with the motif I could go the usb route.

BTW all this also applies for windows 7 64 bit which I also tested.

that’s all

That’s awesome! Thank you for sharing that!

What doesn’t work correctly:
-mlan midi port 3 and 4, so controlling cubase with the motif gets the midi parts mixed up in mlan.

Just a thought, one of the things that has been changed (and standardized) is the DAW Remote Control messages which could be selected back in mLAN on an ES as Port 3 or 4, have been fixed to Port 2 now; Port 3 is the so called “Thru” Port which allows the external 5-pin MIDI jacks to act as an interface for one external device. Port 4 is currently used for the newer Editors (likely not available for your ES Editor)

Don’t know if that info will help you but you may want to see if setting Port 2 as your Cubase Remote control port works.

Thank you Bad.

I tried changing the cubase remote control assignment on the motif from port 4 to 2 but I get the same results. In cubase remote control setup I used a mackie controller but for some reason the midi input and output stays in port 1 although I changed it to use other ports. So in the drop down menu I selected a different port than 1 but after I leave that tab it reverts back to port 1.

This is reflected on the midi port setup tab by showing which ports are active. Another inconvenience is the mlan midi ports show up with the same name but I could tell which one I selected by counting from top to bottom as they are ordered this way.

The good thing is mlan midi selection in a midi track in cubase can be changed to any port and this is also reflected in the midi port setup tab. I tested the plg cards with port 2 and that works fine.

I also tested the Yamaha multi part editor and remote control setup to port 3 to have the motif control the part mix and that worked fine. For some reason the remote control for mlan midi gets locked in port 1 in cubase. But like I said the usb midi has no problems.

Now it would be cool to change the midi assignment in the motif from mlan to usb from the computer, I’m not sure if you can do that with a SysEx message? This would make it faster than going thru the motif menu.

What a lifesaver this thread has been for my Motif 8 ES with mLAN16E and 01X.  These have been sitting idle for some time given the lack of support for new operating systems.

Although mLAN continued to play well on 64-bit XP for me I was finding it harder to justify continuing to work on less powerful machines.  When I inherited my son’s nicely specified machine (having bought him a new one for school) I knew I had to give mLAN on Windows 7 another chance and stumbled across this thread.

After some initial frustrations (see below for a couple of recommendations for a trouble-free path), it was actually fairly painless to install the drivers and get them operating in a fashion where I now have stable audio & MIDI and low latency for 60 tracks each with a separate VSTi instruments and each with at least one VST audio effect plumbed in.

All tracks are triggered by the same MIDI input, meaning they are all playing at exactly the same time.  No problem, and barely any additional utilization on the 7 remaining cores.  I slowly bumped up the number of tracks and found I had to start increasing the ASIO buffer size at around 80 tracks to prevent ASIO time overloading, but that’s not a real-world scenario I envisage anyway and my point was to make sure that it didn’t cause any undue stress to mLAN.

So my fairly unscientific test has given me confidence that I can conjure up a stable and capable Windows 7 (I’m sure Windows 8 & 8.1 also) music PC.  That means I’ll proceed as planned and will probably end up making substantial use of what I thought was my pretty-much obsolete mLAN setup with which I had been so pleased years ago.

So, with many thanks to raphp and all others who blazed the trail, my quick tips for achieving this:

1) Windows 7 requires drivers to be signed.
- There are various mechanisms to cause Windows to execute in Test Mode, which should allow drivers to be installed and loaded, but I had some problems even after following the general directions I found via Google (e.g. here, and here).
- To get around this, I followed the advice in one of the above links to download Ready Driver Plus.  This sets up an additional boot configuration that automatically executes the keystrokes necessary to enter Test Mode and allow unsigned drivers to load and execute.  It was easy to set up and worked right away, allowing me to install v1.55 of the 64-bit XP driver and mLAN Tools.

2) MLAN doesn’t like networking – particularly wireless networks.
- When MLAN starts it will pretty much use up a whole core on the CPU (at least, it does on my machine).  It will hover around 90% on that core if both audio and MIDI are active.  If the wireless adaptor is left active, the utilization will drop to around 40% after a fairly short period of time and either MIDI or audio capability will be lost.  Often, sometime later both are lost and utilization of the MLAN core drops to negligible levels.
- To counter this, disable all network adaptors.  For wireless, it appears to be sufficient to enter Airplane Mode, or disable the wireless adaptor in some other fashion such as using a wireless on/off button if the computer has one.  This makes it extremely easy to switch from “music” PC with no networking to “regular” PC.

That’s it - it just cost me some Googling and experimentation time to get to where I am today, so hopefully these pointers will save somebody else.

Have a great day everyone - I think I am about to… :-)

Regards,
Gary

Some further observations:

1) The mLAN MIDI inputs and outputs are named differently than I’m used to.  I’ve been used to seeing them be named “mLan Midi In” and then “mLAN Midi In 2” through “mLAN MIDI In 17” (much this image that I came across, and similar for the outputs.  Mine are now named as follows:

- 8 are named “mLAN MIDI In”
- 1 is named “2 - mLAN MIDI In”
- 8 are named “3 - mLAN MIDI In”

2) I mentioned above that utilization of the core that is running mLAN was steady at around 90%.  Turns out this was only when running Cubase, and it was far too much to use in conjunction with the Guitar Rig plug-in so I set out to do some investigation.  I should note that I had MIDI output ports 1-4 of the ES connected to computer MIDI input ports1-4 in the Graphic Patchbay.  If I de-activated all the inputs marked “3 - mLAN MIDI In” then my CPU utilization went way down.  If any of them were activated, it shot right back up.  Activating and deactivating he other ports didn’t affect utilization much.  I suspect (but didn’t investigate) that this may be due to the ES spewing out System Real-Time Messages, such as Active Sensing.  I didn’t investigate much further because I decided for the first time in years to forego mLAN MIDI connectivity and instead go with the old Luddite technology of USB (see below).

3) The USB drivers work a treat.  No problem installing, other than I didn’t have my ES connected when I first installed the drivers, so the installation failed.  Easily remedied and now I have full MIDI capability - at least to and from the ES.

4) After doing 3), I changed the Graphic Patchbay configuration to instead connect the 01X MIDI output ports to computer MIDI input ports 1-5.  Unfortunately, I had the same behavior when any of the “3 - mLAN MIDI In” ports were activated, and I investigated far enough to realize that I needed the first one of these to be active in order to received MIDI from the 01X.  So maybe (definitely) I was wrong on the active-sensing thing and I just can’t handle audio + MIDI over mLAN on this machine (an i7 Q720 @ 1.6GHz, turbo up to 2.8GHz).  I have turned off power management and installed the Intel Turbo Monitor, so I can see it’s generally operating at about 2.00+ GHz.

Oh well - I have enough to keep me happy for now.  At some point I’ll try to figure out how to get MIDI remote control of the 01X (which is only available over mLAN) - perhaps by looking into this hardware modification.  We will see…

Regards,
Gary