FTR, playing the stereo too loud is illegal (at least here)–it’s just not enforced. In CA, you can technically get a ticket if you can be heard 70 feet away from your car, but I’ve never heard of it actually happening.
just don’t buy one of the ones that only gives you a choice of like 4 stations, and you should be fine with a good quality one, as long as you don’t live in or very close to a metropolis. I do, so I got a cd player with an aux plug.
Our reviews are mixed; we can’t use it in a city, or anywhere else where there are streetlights and stop lights and other FM stations, but it works fine when we’re tooling along down the highway. We just use it for long car trips now, and it’s worth it for that. If you need it for in a city, you’re probably going to be disappointed.
Thanks for the advice. Looks like it’s out of the running as a Christmas present, and our carbon footprint is going up with a spindle of CDR’s!
Just got a Sansa and an FM transmitter, so I’ll report my findings back to the thread.
I’ve used an iTrip in my 3G iPod quite extensively. Mine did ok, but I live in a rural area. I did find that it cut the treble on my music, so I used the iPod EQ to boost the treble.
I have the Sansa FM transmitter for my Sansa MP3 player. Works pretty good in the country, not at all in the City. I then replaced my receiver so that I could have a proper line in and a usb slot.
OPer, I’m so dissatisfied with my iMonster FM transmitter that I’ll send you mine. PM me with your address and it’ll be yours just as soon as I can package it up and get to the post office.
I smell ad campaign!
I’m using one with my Sirius satellite radio with mixed results. I would much rather be going to an AUX jack on the radio but unfortunately I don’t have one. I’ll be switching to a version that patches directly between the antenna and the radio some weekend soon and I’ll give an update then.
I don’t have any experience with FM transmitters, but my dad uses the griffin SmartDeck tape adapter for his iPod. If you have a cassette player that will actually work with this, it’s really fantastic. I’ve found that most tape adapters are too noisy and just sound crummy in general, but this one plugs into the iPod’s data port instead of using the mini jack and just sounds really, really clean. Unfortunately, our tape deck doesn’t work with it.
Sorry for the hijack, but I’m being wooshed here, right? Please say I’m being wooshed.
Some of these tape adapters seem to work better than others. I had a Sony portable CD player that came with a cassette adapter that worked great. I later bought a different cassette adapter for my iPod, and the audio only came out of one of the stereo channels in the same car, same tape deck.
I started using the iTrip today for my Sansa and it’s fine. Sounds better than the tape deck adapter (which, granted, is 5 years old and well-used), and it’s not too hard to find a station without much interference even though I live right in the middle of a major city. Not Chicago-sized, so I dunno how it will work in OPville.