This is different than the Fender Strat VG guitars which are more like the line 6 variax in that it uses electronics to pitch shift the strings into different tunings.

This guitar actually has motorized tuning pegs to bring the guitar into any of several tunings.

I also think it has a beautiful finish.

No doubt it will be too expensive for me though.

Robo Guitar

Most of these have a specific start and end time while a few can occur on your own schedule as long as you adhere to the time limit. Also most of them have no judging – it’s just a matter of finishing.

Here’s a few that I found:

Song Fight
New week a new fight. They post a title, you email them a 128kbs MP3 song and the internet votes.

Album a Day
Write and Record 20 minutes, or 30 songs in a 24 hour period. This one does not have a common time period.

the 3-Day Novel Contest
A more ambitious challenge. Write a novel in 3 days over labor day weekend. It’s actually a Canadian based contest but the world is invited. The winner gets published.

Script Frenzy
Write a 20,000 word script running about 120 minutes over the month of June.

24 hour comics
If you like pictures with your stories, here you can attempt a 24 page comic book in 24 hours. Any 24 hours will do.

48 Hour Film Project
This is a bigger deal. Sponsored by Visa and it tours from town to town. You have 48 to produce a short film of 4-7 minutes. You’re given a genre, a character, a line of dialog and a prop to help ensure the creation occurs in the alloted time. The 48 hours must encompass screen writing, rehearsal, all filming and editing and delivery to the judges.

The National Film Challenge
Is basically the same thing but, doesn’t travel from city to city. It happens worldwide in October. Also it doesn’t seem to have a big sponsor.

Of all the problems though, to me the biggest was, somehow they made podcasts downloaded from iTunes behave differently from podcasts downloaded through other mechanisms.

They created a special section in the menus for podcasts. But it didn’t trigger off any particular metadata (that was editable through iTunes) so I couldn’t take podcasts that didn’t come through iTunes and fix them up to appear there.

Ok, so podcasts downloaded from iTunes get to go into the new section and podcasts downloaded any other way just goes into the music pile. I guess that’s OK. Through smart play lists I can create my own list to hold my podcasts. They have their list and I have mine.

But wait, iTunes podcasts were showing up in my lists. As far as the smart play lists were concerned, iTunes podcasts were just like regular podcasts. Cool, I can just use one list, my smart play list to get at both iTunes and non-iTunes podcasts.

Denied! Although iTunes podcasts show up in the smart play lists, they can’t be played from there. (!?)

So if you had a smart play list that was limited to the 20 most recent podcasts and let’s say 3 of them were downloaded through iTunes, you’d see 20 tracks in iTunes and on the iPod, but when you started playing the list you’d see the counter said it was playing 1 of 17. Why? To serve us better I guess.

Ok, I guess I just have to subscribe to all my podcasts using the same mechanism. But wait! Not so easy because iTunes does not support opml files for either import or export. So I have to move them all by hand, one by one.

I moved all my subscriptions into Juice, which has it’s own issues but at least mp3 files which happen to be podcasts will behave like mp3 files with respect to play lists.

But how to I get all the old podcasts that I still have to listen to out of their special, iTunes only, resort menu?

I tried pulling the MP3s out of iTunes entirely and re-importing them but NO, iTunes still knew they were special and treated them that way. So clearly there was something about the files themselves.

I finally found out what that was.

When iTunes downloads a podcasts it adds a special extended tag ITUNESPODCAST=1, to the MP3. It doesn’t expose that tag through the iTunes interface, so you can’t change it easily. But using a tag editor such as MP3Tag you can find this tag and delete it, turning this “special” MP3 into a normal MP3 that obeys all of your finely crafted smart play lists

Oh, except smart play lists are now broken on my new iPod classic.

Damn!

I like the podcasting aspect since I’m not all that prolific. People can subscribe and they’ll just see stuff as I publish it.

I have many musical fragments that just languish on their lazy asses on my hard drive. Others may like them. And if I’m putting stuff out there I might feel more motivation to finish stuff.

Elephant Family