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Scott, I think that's a great solution! The only parts of my situation that would preclude it are: Not sure I'm organized enough to reburn the CD each morning, I like to have a couple of audio books at their full length (I like revisiting reference texts, plus language learning audio, plus podcasts (including one I found of the daily Mass readings), and enough music to get through seven or eight different mood or task needs (classical for work mostly, but also flamenco/world, blues and classic rock, some heavy metal etc.). And you're right, why doesn't every car come with an easy to access auxiliary line input? Maybe they figure they'd sell fewer components? My 1993 Volvo wagon (The Big Red Brick) has a cassette player and I use a direct adapter in that. It works a lot better than my Belkin radio tuner ever did (though I had the cheaper model of the Belkin with only four frequencies)...

Hey Ernesto,

Yep, each person has different solutions that work well for them. No argument at all. A few points to keep in mind:

1. An MP3 CD holds a huge amount of audio. You can put 2-4 typical audio books on a single MP3 CD. It amazed me! When I was listening to the most recent Michael Crichton novel and Anne Rice novel, I was amazed that they each took about a third of the CD. The Crichton novel came on about 11 standard format CDs and bam! Now it was a fraction of this single CD.

2. An MP3 CD holds a huge amount of audio continued: Outside of audio books, you could also put about 200-300 songs on a single MP3 CD. Combine that with a CD player's shuffle mode and you have a decent degree of musical serendipity.

3. In my case my car's stereo is multi-CD. I put the daily podcasting one in slot one. I have three audio books in slots four through six.

4. As I'd mentioned, I tend to think that any extensive commute (as mine is) should have some periodic planning via a playlist so that you aren't finagling the MP3 player too much while driving. Since you need to spend a moment to plug in your MP3 player/iPod to sync this playlist, burning a CD instead is about as much effort.

In any case, to each his own. There are certainly circumstances where a small flash based player is the best solution. I'd just never seen a writeup from someone who went from iPod "backwards" to a CD. But I've been doing a lot of things like that this past year or so. I think that perhaps when you work in the embedded electronics market, you get this perspective of "what's the least amount of hardware to get the task at hand done".

BTW, I like your naming of your daily commuter as "The Big Red Brick". I call my car Ruby -- partly because of its color and partly because Ruby was (is?) the computer generated (babe) mascot of ATI.

That's a shame that the iPod-to-radio kit for the VW is so lame and doesn't offer more control/information from the iPod. That's going to be one of my items to check when I'm looking at new cars. I believe the Honda radio kits have full control over the iPods, but I'll have to verify that when I'm going on test drives.

Hi Will,

I get the feeling that a lot of kits for connecting to the OEM factory radio are using the same few chipsets and often get very limited control. They often "fake out" the external CD changer interface which was common in radios of the past 10 years or so. They don't have a lot of true integration but tend to be routing the analog signal and a few forward/next signals to the iPod. Certainly the kit available for my Accord wasn't all that advanced either. I tend to think the aftermarket radios are doing more to push the envelope in iPod integration. They need to if they're going to sway people to upgrade their OEM radios.

Scott, good points all -- but they bring to mind another thought on this: CD players don't allow bookmarking... (at least not the ones I'm used to...) This would be a big drawback for me not only with audiobooks but also with podcasts... Kristen actually named the brick, because it was her car before it was mine. We traded my car for the minivan a while back, and I inherited the brick. And I love it -- both the car and the name! Nothing like an old school Volvo to just chill you out (in a good, safe, relaxed way) on the road.

Hi Ernesto,

It's certainly one of the big downsides in a certain sense. As you move among different tracks, it will not remember were you are. Many early MP3 players didn't bookmark audio files of books and podcasts until the past few years. If I'm listening to an audio book and come back to it later without switching the disc mid-stream, the car stereo will come back to it later when I re-start the car. But yes, switching/ejecting disks will cause it to forget, much like a DVD player does. Typically if I'm going to listen later at my desk, I'll make a mental note of how many minutes in I am, but that's often more than some want to do. Bookmarking was one of the nice features Apple and Creative added to their players.

It was actually my desire to wean off the iPod that prompted my recent purchases of AudioHijack Pro and its sister application, Fission, from the folks at Rogue Amoeba (great name, eh):

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/

With Audio Hijack Pro and a minimal amount of scripting, it's possible in an automated fashion to transcode any proprietary DRM'd material back into vanilla MP3 format while preserving the ID tags and incurring minimal transcoding noise. With Fission it's trivial to take a big 2+ hour audio MP3 file (for instance, from an audio book) and split it into small chunks without adding ANY noise in the derivative files.

For example, these tools were excellent for taking the 3 large files of one of my iTunes Music Store audio books (a Narnia book), converting them into 3 MP3 files, and then later splitting those into many smaller files based on chapter breaks (it can sense pauses in the audio).

I don't think I ever mentioned it before but in my last job we worked with both Creative and Apple's chip supplier (PortalPlayer) in putting the USB function on their chipsets. We also worked with SanDisk, but I'm not certain whether it was for their MP3 line. The ironic thing about supplying both Apple and Creative, it was hard for us to care who really won in the MP3 wars. Either way we got a decent quarterly royalty.