Orbital Live

The Orbital Live CD's were mixed down digitally from two original sources: DAT and analog tape. The DAT was recorded directly off the sound board at the concert while the analog tape was used to record what the crowd heard. The two were digitized, edited, and mixed using Macromedia's SoundEdit 16.

Significant editing was required to synchronize the two sources due to inopportune tape flipping and problems with the varying playback speed of the analog tape. Cue points in the music were used to align the sources and to calculate quantitative pitch adjustments. In one case, the tape speed varied constantly throughout the track, so individual segments were adjusted at intervals to approximate a correction for the changing speed of the analog tape.

A 45-minute interview with the brothers Paul and Phil, who are Orbital, was included in addition to the concert audio. The interview was divided into one 10-minute portion that appears on the first disc, and a 35-minute portion that comes at the end of the second disc.

Finally, a third CD accompanies the first two, which contains a duplicate of the Orbital webcast on disc, as well as a hypervideo of the interview. The hypervideo engine was developed in Director by former IDT students David Balcom and Nick Sawhney, and the content of the interview was produced by student Derek Bambach. The engine itself allows one to hyperlink portions of video, just as the hyperaudio engine does in the Orbital webcast.