Thanks to the valuable archive info I am fully aware of the need to have the FW expansion board in the XF to transfer multi-track audio into Cubase. The question arises is there a new interface on the horizon at Yamaha that would use a more current data transfer method for transferring the audio data to Cubase? I am somewhat hesitant to go for the FX extension board since for me it means getting a new laptop in addition to the FW board (my current laptop is not FW capable.)

Or is there hopefully some other less costly alternative my in-experience prevents me from being aware of?

Tom Galgano

First off, whatever plans Yamaha may or may not have to replace FW transfer, if it’s not available now, no one knows ‘now’, or, if anyone does know now, they certainly wouldn’t be allowed to tell you about it. Most new products are announced at Winter NAMM and the next one is January 2015. Given Yamaha’s experience with mLAN, one has to feel it may be some time before the company invests too much money in new data transfer and communication protocols.

Depending on how much data you need to transfer between your XF and your DAW you can - for the princely sum of nothing - just transfer files by converting and then exporting individual tracks as wave files saved to a USB stick. Obviously if you had dozens of tracks that would get laborious but two or three or four..? Re-aligning them in your DAW shouldn’t pose much of a problem, either.

The most sophisticated route at the moment remains FW and it would seem highly unlikely that any new protocol adoption by Yamaha (i.e. Thunderbolt) would be retrofittable to FW products like the Motif. On future synths? Who knows?

It’s a conundrum that while Apple is almost out of the FireWire business FireWire still makes the most sense on/for your musical hardware. Only you can say whether it’s worth picking up an older laptop ‘just’ for your music, but maybe so?

Hope this gives you some perspective to help you in your decision-making process anyhow.

MM

Thanks for the response, I ended up buying a refurbished laptop with the slot to handle the firewire adapter card to process the signal from my XF8 so now I can take full advantage of the XF/Cubase integration.