Quickfire: prior to the launch of his new album, William Orbit has launched the Orbitmixer, his new invention which gives fans the opportunity to tinker with his tracks.(Forum)

What is the Orbitmixer?

It's a simple piece of kit built mainly in Flash that has eight of my tracks pre-loaded into it. It basically replicates an eight-track mixing desk. Users can load up one of my songs and use the online desk to play around with them--say, like, remove the drums, or the vocals and so on.

How did the idea come to you?

I can't even remember where the idea came from. I remember someone mentioning a software product called Ableton to me. Those in the hip-hop community started using it in the mid-Nineties--it was basically a drum machine with 12 pre-programmed pads, that you could tap on to create a desired noise. Now you can buy the Ableton software, which allows you to record and mix songs, so artists, radio programmers and DJs are using it. I think that's where the basic idea for the mixer came from. I'd like to think that one day I might be able to release music in an Ableton-friendly format, so when you buy my music, you also download the software with it. I could just release music through Ableton, for example.

Why launch this bit of kit?

What's interesting about this is that it requires people to get involved with the music. Nowadays, with iPods, mp3 players, car stereos, it's easy for people to simply put the music on in the background and go off and make a cup of tea or something, but then people don't like sitting in an armchair staring into space. This actually makes people get involved with what they are listening to.

Surely, because it loads up on computer, it will make it easy for people to record their own versions of your songs and potentially share them on P2P networks?