iPods in the car
Jun. 2nd, 2005 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinSince car cassette players started being replaced in most models by CD players, it's been harder to plug arbitrary audio inputs into your car stereo, which is unfortunate for people with MP3 players. Actually, I had the problem to begin with: when I bought my car it had the factory cassette deck in it, but for some reason I could never figure out, it refused to work with a cassette adapter. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samantha2074 (who seems to do most of the car audio upgrading around here) had long since had it replaced with an aftermarket CD player, and in the iTunes era I coped by burning mix CDs, which was generally fine with me.
Still, I envied Sam when she upgraded her own car with a stereo that had an aux input jack right on the front panel (those were very hard to find at the time, and are still not exactly common). She got a three-headed Belkin gadget that plugged into the cigarette lighter and the aux jack, and she could charge and listen to her iPod by attaching it to a single dock connector.
She'd wanted to get me a similar setup for a while. I'd tried and been dissatisfied with an FM transmitter (one of the lousy early-model Belkin Tunecasts that only used four frequencies, all of them badly interfered with in metro Boston).
For my birthday she went the extra mile, and got me an Alpine CD player with an iPod interface module, which is accurately reviewed in this Playlist magazine article from 2004. The installers put the dock connector inside the glove compartment; while it's connected, the iPod is controlled entirely from the dashboard stereo controls (there seems to be special support for this in the iPod firmware), its own controls do nothing, and you might as well put it away neatly.
I am mostly thrilled with this thing, though it costs more than other approaches (including installation if you're not inclined to hack your car) and the technology is not 100% mature yet. The user interface is clearly adapted from the controls for a trunk-mounted CD changer, and while it will display track titles, album titles, artists and playlist names on the dash, and you can browse through them with the knob, rapid iPod-style scrolling through very long lists is not possible. But the sound quality is great, and it works fine as long as you read the manual before you try anything, and you're satisfied with organizing most of your car listening through playlists.
You don't want to be doing complicated manipulations on your car stereo anyway. But the cheaper solutions that exploit the iPod's own controls are still probably better if you've got a personal DJ riding shotgun, especially if you're on a long road trip. For my daily commute, though, I like having iPod controls on the dash, and especially having the track name in big lights.
It will even pick up where you left off if you paused the iPod before plugging it in. If there isn't a current playlist, it tends to pretend it's a CD changer and start playing what it thinks is the first album, which means I hear the beginning of "Come Together" a lot.
There are competing car stereo iPod interfaces that work with stereos by Pioneer and Kenwood. It sounds to me as if the Pioneer unit has the same limitations and then some; everyone who bought it seems to hate it and curse its user interface. I haven't heard much of anything about the Kenwood, which is newer.
samantha2074 (who seems to do most of the car audio upgrading around here) had long since had it replaced with an aftermarket CD player, and in the iTunes era I coped by burning mix CDs, which was generally fine with me.Still, I envied Sam when she upgraded her own car with a stereo that had an aux input jack right on the front panel (those were very hard to find at the time, and are still not exactly common). She got a three-headed Belkin gadget that plugged into the cigarette lighter and the aux jack, and she could charge and listen to her iPod by attaching it to a single dock connector.
She'd wanted to get me a similar setup for a while. I'd tried and been dissatisfied with an FM transmitter (one of the lousy early-model Belkin Tunecasts that only used four frequencies, all of them badly interfered with in metro Boston).
For my birthday she went the extra mile, and got me an Alpine CD player with an iPod interface module, which is accurately reviewed in this Playlist magazine article from 2004. The installers put the dock connector inside the glove compartment; while it's connected, the iPod is controlled entirely from the dashboard stereo controls (there seems to be special support for this in the iPod firmware), its own controls do nothing, and you might as well put it away neatly.
I am mostly thrilled with this thing, though it costs more than other approaches (including installation if you're not inclined to hack your car) and the technology is not 100% mature yet. The user interface is clearly adapted from the controls for a trunk-mounted CD changer, and while it will display track titles, album titles, artists and playlist names on the dash, and you can browse through them with the knob, rapid iPod-style scrolling through very long lists is not possible. But the sound quality is great, and it works fine as long as you read the manual before you try anything, and you're satisfied with organizing most of your car listening through playlists.
You don't want to be doing complicated manipulations on your car stereo anyway. But the cheaper solutions that exploit the iPod's own controls are still probably better if you've got a personal DJ riding shotgun, especially if you're on a long road trip. For my daily commute, though, I like having iPod controls on the dash, and especially having the track name in big lights.
It will even pick up where you left off if you paused the iPod before plugging it in. If there isn't a current playlist, it tends to pretend it's a CD changer and start playing what it thinks is the first album, which means I hear the beginning of "Come Together" a lot.
There are competing car stereo iPod interfaces that work with stereos by Pioneer and Kenwood. It sounds to me as if the Pioneer unit has the same limitations and then some; everyone who bought it seems to hate it and curse its user interface. I haven't heard much of anything about the Kenwood, which is newer.