The Recording Studio that Spanned a Continent

On September 23, 2000, a jazz group performed in a concert hall at McGill University in Montreal and the recording engineers mixing the 12 channels of uncompressed PCM audio during the performance were not in a booth at the back of the hall, but rather in a theatre at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. To our knowledge, this is the first time that live audio of this quality has been streamed over the Internet. This paper describes the hardware configuration and software system used for the demonstration, explaining the motivation for our approach and summarizing some of the important lessons learned during the development process.