This is sure to be the first of many posts on the upcoming ACL Festival (aka The-Big-Annual-Austin-Music-Festival -Other-Than-SXSW) from myself and the other Austin Metbloggers. Our little group blog was born just after the festival last year, so this is our first chance to cover it as a group. Stay tuned for plenty more.

With a little more than a week to go until Austin City Limits Festival 2005, the ACL promotors are in full propaganda mode. I just got their latest e-mail which led me to an impressive aerial photo from last year’s festival on the same page as this year’s map. Is that Town Lake Entrance new this year? I don’t recall it being there last year.

You have the option this year of creating a custom schedule or downloading the whole schedule as a pdf or to your ipod. If you’re creating a custom schedule, they give you the option of doing so with or without registering, ostensibly to allow you to retrieve it later or share it with friends, but seeing as they have your e-mail address, I’m sure they won’t be able to resist using it for other purposes. I’d advise skipping the customization altogether though as “customizing” entails being able to check a box and highlight particular boxes on the schedule. The interface looked pretty crappy on both IE and Firefox and didn’t print out any better on my one attempt.

Lastly, the ACL site already does a passable job of this, but the Austinist points out that someone has taken the time to compile bios and mp3 links for every band in this year’s line-up.