Midi, Appletalk, and Airport Extreme in a Studio?

[stizz]

I have a interesting puzzle to solve. I am in the process of moving a studio to a new location. While we are at it, we have decided that we want all the macs to talk to one another so that large audio files can be moved around easily. Furthermore, we want it all to be wireless since we already have a mess of cables to deal with.

Has anybody here done anything like this? Midi is an important part of this setup, and I know that appletalk does not work well with midi. What are my networking options? And will the airport extreme conflict with the 2.6 wireless phones in the office and studio? I'm thinking that we would have to keep appletalk off when we were recording/composing. Then turn it on to transfer data, then turn it off again. There has to be an easier way.

The setup looks like this.

1 dual 800 G4 - (os9) composers system
1 667 G4 - (os9) Video capture system
1 400 G3 - (dual boot 9/X) Server with multiple big hard drives
1 12'' powerbook - (osX)composer's portable office

 

[rhg]

I would not go wireless for this purpose. You get very poor transmission rates. Airport Extreme doesn't really help very much unless you are close to the base station because transmission rates degrade significantly with distance.

In my project studio, I once tried to solve everything with a single Ethernet link to any machine, but it turned out not to work.

You need dedicated cabling for audio anyway, so I would rather have a look at mLan. Now that the Yamaha 01X is coming I expect mLan to become very popular.

With mLan you have a single FireWire link to each system. This single link will handle audio, midi and probably file/printer sharing simultaneously.