If you want to read the most creative sales literature imaginable, sample the marketing material for audio interconnect cables. The esoteric end of the hi-fi market offers cable products which claim to deliver the highest possible quality, and yet these products aren't used in even the best-equipped recording studios. If the recording is being made with 'lesser' cable, then I fail to understand how a more expensive product can reveal hidden sonic detail in the recording when it is played back in a domestic environment.

I thought I'd already seen the world's most ridiculous, overpriced audio cable, but then I saw the 'proprietary' Denon AK-DL1 digital audio interconnect. Retailing at $499 US dollars, it looks uncannily like an ordinary RJ45 ethernet cable costing around 1% as much, albeit with pretty woven jacketing. I was especially bemused to find out that the AK-DL1 is meant to be directional - having spent nearly $500 on a 1.5 metre network cable, you wouldn't want to connect it up the 'wrong way round'.

To send multiple channels of losless digital audio over network cables, you can use the NetJack extension to the JACK sound server. Not only is NetJack a Free Software download, it works with ordinary network cable too!

Not unlike the Blender Foundation's Open Movie projects, the Morevna Project is aiming to create a full-length movie in the Anime genre, using only Free Software tools. The main applications in use are:

• 2D animation: Synfig Studio
• 3D modeling and animation: Blender
• Static images: GIMP and Krita

The project looks like it has a lot of work still to do, and so the organisers are appealing for creative people to get involved.

On listening to the Dinosaur Jr. album Farm, I became convinced that the CD was merely the latest casualty in the loudness war, and had been excessively limited on purpose. Instead, the band's label PIAS has claimed that there was a mistake at the duplication plant in Europe, and has offered a free replacement CD to anyone who sends back the original disc. If only the duplication plant had used Jamin (covered in chapter 10 of Crafting Digital Media) to check the master, a lot of trouble could have been avoided. I now have the second pressing of the disc, which is 3dB quieter but sounds a lot, lot better.

Still, PIAS should be commended for offering a refund once the mistake was discovered. This is in stark contrast to Metallica's refusal to remaster their album Death Magnetic, despite a petition from over 21,000 fans of the band.

Out of the Cold Blue, page 2

While working on my own book, I've also been typesetting a 240 page poetry book by Richard McKane using Scribus, for the publisher Hearing Eye. Years ago I used to use Quark Xpress for this sort of project, so I was pleased to find out that Free Software can now do the same job.

I used the font Deja Vu Book because of its support for the Turkish characters used in the manuscript, which used to be a real typesetting challenge on proprietary software. Modern Turkish has all kinds of characters that aren't used in the standard Latin alphabet - the letter i with no dot, for instance. Most fonts left these characters out, and when importing documents the software often failed to recognise them, leaving the pages to be manually corrected. Fortunately, Scribus and GNU/Linux have much better support for internationalisation than the System 7 and System 8 Macs that I learned typesetting on.

These are my tips for book production with Scribus:
Out of the Cold Blue, front cover

1. Use the latest upstream stable version of Scribus. The GNU/Linux distribution packages are often a release or two behind, and you really don't want that.

2. Unless you have a very fast CPU in your computer, break the book document up into sections or chapters - it will make the editing process much more bearable. It also keeps the sections separate at the proofing and corrections stage.

3. Import master pages from one section to another to maintain consistency, such as margin and page number formatting.

4. Export each section as an individual PDF file. Then use pdftk to stitch the sections together into a single inside pages PDF for your litho platemaker or print-on-demand digital press. No doubt the cover will be required as a separate PDF anyway.

The cover for this particular book was designed by my friend and colleague Valerie Mondesir. We worked together at Copyart, then part of InterChange Studios in Kentish Town, London, during the 1990's.