Since I spend a lot of time in my car traveling from assignment to assignment, I like to make the experience as comfortable for me as possible. And the one thing that's been able to consistently calm my nerves when stuck in teeth-snarling traffic jams, is the ability to listen to music.
While most people might say: "So, big deal, everyone likes to listen to music in their cars," those people might not realize just how much of a music enthusiast – or as my fiancé puts it "a music nerd" – I am. And I'm not talking about just rock n' roll – which I love – but nearly every music genre under the sun. (Except, maybe, Top 40 though that new Rhianna song keeps getting stuck in my head.)
Getting Sirius (and XM)
A couple of Christmases ago, I got a subscription to Sirius Satellite Radio as a gift and have been hooked ever since. While the gift was, ostensibly, so I could listen to Howard Stern who had just made the jump from terrestrial radio to satellite, I quickly fell in love with the other Sirius stations as well. And now that Sirius has merged with its only rival XM there are more choices than ever before. (Though I've noticed some of my favorite channnels, including Sirius Disorder and Backspin, have been axed which is sad. Bring 'em back!)
With Sirius alone, not only were there over 20 different rock n' roll stations, each devoted to a specific form of rock; there are five jazz and blues stations; three classical; five country stations including one totally devoted to bluegrass music; three Latin/international stations; six hip-hop/R&B stations, and whole slew of music stations that aren't even classifiable. This isn't even including all the talk radio stations which run the gamut from Howard Stern to NPR to ESPN, Martha Stewart, CNN, traffic reports from across the country, Radio Korea, Canadian weather, the BBC, Playboy Radio, and a whole lot more.
If you were an XM user before the merger, you will now find 22 fresh new channels on your radio, while Sirius adds 11 channels. (Though these new Sirius channels are mostly music, it still saddens me to lose some of my favorites. C'mon guys, bring 'em back!) A bunch of channels that overlapped between the two services have been renamed and/or moved.
With all this selection, you'd think I'd be covered, right? Not quite. While I love the thrill of radio in that you never know what's going to come on next, there are times when I want to listen to my own music. In the past this would mean carrying around a bunch of CDs all the time. This has all changed for me and, doubtless, for many others with the birth of the iPod. Now most of my favorite music is squeezed into this tiny, rectangular, white device.
Getting Your iPod to Play in Your Car
If you don't own a brand new car – many of which now have inputs so you can directly connect your iPod to you car stereo – there are two options for listening to your iPod in your car, both of them bad. You can use what's called an FM transmitter which connects to you iPod and beams the tunes to an empty channel on the car's radio. The downside to this is that the sound quality is hit or miss and it's a pain in the butt finding a "dead" channel in a crowded metropolitan radio market.
The other choice is to get one of those iPod cassette tape car adaptors which plugs into the headphone jack of your iPod and then is loaded into cassette player of your car. I don't need to tell you how poor the sound quality of this antiquated set-up is.
A Better Connection
As an alternative to those two "solutions," a buddy of mine came up with a great work around for connecting your iPod directly to your car stereo. Here's how he did it:
1) Most cars of the pre-iPod era come with a way to hook up a CD changer in the trunk of your car. Depending on the make of your car, special adaptors are available online that allow an RCA-style plug (like the one that connects a CD player to a receiver in a typical stereo) into the "proprietary" plug for the trunk CD changer. Since my buddy and I own similar cars, it's an adaptor that's specific to VW/Audi CD changers for circa 2001 models.
2) Head over to Radio Shack (you gotta love Radio Shack!) and buy a long RCA cable and an RCA-to-minijack adapter, which let you plug the RCA cable into the iPod's headphone port.
3) Connect the long RCA cable from your iPod through the back seat of your car (there's usually a way you can push it through the "ski hole" or the gap where the back seat folds down) and into the trunk where you hook it into to the CD changer with the help of the special adaptor.
4) Start your car, power on your iPod, and turn on your car stereo. Press play on your iPod and your tunes should start blasting.
While this solution offer much better sound than the alternatives, a word to the wise for commuters. Always keep one eye on the road when your changing tunes on your iPod!