Query: After-Market iPod Connection?

Does your current car stereo include a cassette player? If so, you can plug your iPod into it with a "cassette adapter," available for $10-$15 in any electronics store and several chain drugstores. It's a cheap gadget and the sound quality is only passable. OTOH, I've always found that demanding high quality from a car sound system is an exercise in futility, because road noise tends to drown out the subtler parts of the music anyway.

If you don't have a cassette player, or if you want better sound than it will deliver, then you can replace your car stereo with one that includes an auxiliary input jack. Just walk into any store that sells car stereos, and look for a unit that has a front-mounted aux input jack. There are plenty of them -- it's a popular feature. Some of them will even include "iPod-ready" in their features list.

Often if you don't have an aux jack on the stereo, you will probably have to get a customized jack that attaches to the back of your car stereo, or wherever the sirius box attached to. There are lots of companies that make custom after-market jacks and it shouldn't be too hard to find something with creative uses of google.

icarkits.com is one place I found without much trouble on the web for buying such kits.

I recently had to replace my car radio system due to the CD player dying, and I found a very affordable one at Bestbuy, it was around $120, that has a CD player that can read all CD-Rs (some players won't), mp3 files, etc, AND has a USB port so you can use your iPod's USB cable to link directly to the stereo. It also has a slot for an SD memory card, so it gives you a lot of options. The brand is Insignia, and Bestbuy installed it for me for free, I feel like I got a good deal.

1) Cassette thing works OK.

2) FM transmitters generally don't work as well.

3) Headphone out->aux in is OK

Ideal is a new radio that has a line for the iPod and that you can control the ipod from the radio itself. Pricey, but its nice (we don't have one yet...), if my son gets a new radio for his car, I'll help him upgrade to one with this option cause its easier to fiddle with the radio than to hold an iPod. Not that we encourage much fiddling with anything whilst driving.

Regularly Best Buy has a free install option, you need to pay for parts, but it saves ya like $40.

Funny you should ask this, it recently cropped up on a web forum I read regularly. All the other suggestions given by people above would do the job, but one solution not mentioned so far would be to buy a device that actually connects in to the aerial cable behind the stereo. This then hooks up to the iPod. When you're using the iPod, it isolates the aerial connection so the only signal is from there - when you want to use the radio again, it's just like normal. Don't have any personal experience of this but it seems to be a cheaper solution that a whole new stereo. Here's a link - http://www.dension.com/icelinkfm.php

I was going to suggest what Jim Millen already did, so I'll second that if your car doesn't have a line in jack you can use for this purpose.

I had the same problem and solved it by buying a very small portable speaker that I leave in the passenger seat of my car.

I spent ~$200 from Crutchfield for a new stereo that came "Ipod-ready" and $50 for the Ipod adapter (small box that hides behind the dash and interfaces between the stereo and Ipod). Took about 90 minutes to install, 2 hours with all clean up and reading instructions. Well worth it! The stereo is MUCH better than the factory one, and it has HD-radio which is nice for those occasions when you are without an Ipod. The Ipod sound quality exceeded my expectations, it sounds fantastic. I hadn't realized how much sound quality I was giving up using the FM transmitter.

A physicist-y answer: Find out where your car's external antenna plugs into the radio. Disconnect this wire. In its place, connect ~2 feet of wire which snakes *out* of the dashboard and coils around at the bottom of, e.g., a cupholder. Store your iPod transmitter in said cupholder.

Voila! It's a radio which couples strongly to the iPod and weakly to the outside world. Even better: use coax between the radio and the cupholder. Put a Faraday cage around the cupholder to totally block the outside world. And a knife switch to disconnect/reconnect the external antenna.

The problem with the FM solution is not just the dearth of empty channels ... it's that those channels are being used by other iPods! You can listen to all kinds of interesting music if you tune to a dead channel and drive near a large campus.

I have the Monster FM adapter. It works. It's fine around town, because I can find an open channel that works for 98% of my daily driving.

Travel is much worse because you have to hop frequencies as you move around. It's fairly difficult to reprogram the adapter as you drive; I've done it but it's probably not a great idea.

Bottom line, it works well enough that I'm not motivated to change now. But when I buy another car, I will either make sure it has an aux-in jack, or replace the head unit.

I use an iPod2car (or whatever they're calling it this year). Most cars these days come with an option for a CD changer; when you get that option, they just plug it into a jack in the back of your existing car stereo. The iPod2car tells your stereo that it's a CD changer, and tells your iPod that it's a dock, and you can listen to your music and charge your iPod at the same time.

I have to chime in with the aftermarket stereo option. There are several different options available. Some have an AUX in, some have the USB and separate adaptor, and some have a cable that plugs directly into the iPod (no adaptor needed) and will provide control of the iPod through the radios' own interface.

Benefits include simplicity and improved sound quality. I have the Alpine CDE-9881 myself. No extra adapters and the radio comes with a handy remote that also runs the iPod. Easy enough to install yourself, but many retailers such as Best Buy offer free installation with purchase. Don't forget to consider a mounting bracket for the iPod. I would shy away from the all-in-one type of holder and spend a little more for one made specifically for the iPod. This also makes the cable management easier since you can tie-wrap the cable from the radio to the mount and keep everything secure and not flopping around your car.

We just got a Sony head-unit stereo installed and love it. Having lived with iPod batteries running out after a good day's driving, we went for the model that was direct USB (the sound through the USB connection is much better than aux-in - our model has both, as our household also has a first-gen iPod - built like a russian tank!) The direct USB allows us to navigate playlists and shuffle everything as though we were navigating through the iPod itself, which is great cos you can just shove it away in a glovebox (the USB cord comes out the back). And it stays charged. I lived with a Griffin FM transmitter for years - was ok when driving in the countryside, but re batteries and driving through a town - no go.

All obsolete in a few years - enormous flash drives will appear in cars as a given methinks, bluetooth or wifi for you to load music files onto.

There are two main ways you can go, if you don't get all DIY-y like people are saying:

1. Line-in, which gives you just the audio from your iPod but forces you to control it by handling the iPod, which is at LEAST as safe as dialing a cellphone while eating. Maybe.

2. iPod integration stuff, where it'll hook up to the iPod's dock connector and let you browse it via the normal stereo controls and display.

The latter is obviously far better, but also limited to only work with actual iPods (or Zunes in the case of... Ford, I think it is?), which is lame. I mean, even if you have an iPod now, your car probably has a longer useful life than your PMP. But help is on the way with the recently announced CEA-2017, an industry standard that "defines electrical and mechanical properties for a connector that will pass audio, video and associated metadata signals, control signals, and power between portable electronic devices and in-home and in-vehicle audio/video systems."

Of course, no devices or vehicles exist that support it yet, but it appears to have major backers, so is hopefully the way forward.

(Also of course, some new cars have built in hard drives and such, which can hold music internally -- but unless you're going to load the internal drive off of CDs (as they currently do), you still need/want an interface to external devices. But honestly, if the device interface is good enough, you may not need or want an internal storage system at all.)

Slightly offtopic but combining two threads, there's a product called The Slip from Slip Streams (here's one place to purchase) that lets you listen to your ipod more-or-less safely while riding your bicycle. It's a little foam wedge that holds the earbud outside your ear and shields much of the wind from your ear, and as a result you can hear your music and the noises of the road around you. I regularly cycle to work, and do a great deal of iPod listening with these. I don't think they're any more distracting than having a radio on in the car.

I have an IceLink - it works fairly well, but I don't use the car controls for it, as the response is very slow. The only other complaint I have is that it doesn't seem to charge the iPod as advertised, so I need to charge it up every night during a road trip.

Really, the car audio folks need to do better.

the best way to play ur ipod in your car is a simple wire which has an input pin to your car audio system at one end and an out put pin to your ipod at the other end. Problem solved. It is available at all music stores at minimum cost. so have fun n keep rocking!