Just a friendly warning to those that have not taken up the Bards College questlines, it is extremely bugged.

1) NPCs are bugged, especially the headmaster
2) Journal entries don't update
3) Quest items don't get removed from inventory
4) Even if you're a full member, nothing in the college is lootable w/out theft and you can't even use the beds

It's a joke of a guild; it's as if the devs ran out of time or something and just left it incomplete. Shame cause there are plenty of NPCs, buiding is nice and big.

It has all the makings for a good questline, but steer clear at least until the bugs are patched.

Funny because I haven't noticed anything you said except:

3) Quest items don't get removed from inventory

... that happened to me.

I got the console codes from the wiki to remove those musical instruments after the quest as they encumber you in your inventory--
player.removeitem 000DABAB 1
player.removeitem 000DABA9 1
player.removeitem 000DABA7 1

You can also use the player.drop command to drop them on the ground instead.

the only issue i had is that the quest items don't get removed..

However one beneficial bug that occurred while "completeing" the instrument quest was that if i did the dialogue with each of them fast enough, i could continueously bump up my skill in whatever they were able to teach me... which was pretty cool ..... initially i was doing that to get rid of the damn instruments.. but whatever.... nice to gain about 2.5 levels just by talking my face off...

after about 2.5levels the dialogue stopped giving me skill jumps.

It ain't beneficial Judas, it's called cheat exploitation

Anyways, I did this after completing the 4 major guilds and already had one quest item for the first Bard quest without knowing it, so that triggered the other bugs.

I blame alot of bugs in this game from picking quest items that were never supposed to be picked up prior to receiving the quest. "Radiant AI" is responsible for this cluster[censored].