The evolution of playing music in my car
All I wanted to do was wirelessly control the music in my car. I didn’t think I was asking too much. I had an iPhone so I knew whatever I was going to do it would involve that.
My first attempt.
I bought a small Zotac mini-itx computer from mini-itx.com with built in wifi and an intelligent dc-dc power supply from mini-box.com that would “safely” turn off my computer when the car was turned off. I took this small computer and mounted it in the back of my car. I then wrote a small program that would load iTunes at start up. Using the iTunes api, this program would load the last song played and also keep track of the current song so it would know what to play the next the computer was started. I then downloaded Apple’s free app called Remote and installed it on my iPhone. The last step was simply bridging the two together. This was actually pretty simple once I found a small wifi router that could run off of usb power. So when my car turned on it would power up my computer at which point would then give power to the router. I could then start up the Remote app on my iPhone. This allowed me to control music wirelessly in my car... exactly what I wanted!Pros
- Great sound quality
- Can hold all of my music, plus most anyone else’s
- Controlled by my iPhone
- Wifi in my car (Seems like there should have been a lot of potential here!)
- Expensive - Required a computer, dc-dc power supply, and portable router
- Boot up time - roughly 20 to 30 seconds, depending on how “safely” it was shut down
- Needed to open Remote app to control songs
- Annoying - Because the router didn’t actually have an internet connection, whenever, I would do something on my iPhone that required the internet I would have to disable wifi so it would utilize the 3g network instead
My second attempt.
Slightly more involved! I really liked the Remote app from Apple but I felt like it was missing one feature, the ability to control another iPhone or iPod and that is how iRemote came to be. I used the wifi router that I had previously purchased for my car computer and installed iRemote on both my iPhone and my iPod Touch. I placed my iPod Touch in the console of my car and then connected it to the auxiliary input hidden inside of the console. When the car turned on I would start iRemote in server mode if it wasn’t already running and then start iRemote in client mode on my iPhone. This allowed me to control music wirelessly in my car... exactly what I wanted!Pros
- Great sound quality
- Low cost (I already had a first generation iPod Touch)
- Simple
- Needed to start iRemote on both the iPhone and iPod touch if they weren’t running
- Same wifi annoyance - Because the router didn’t actually have an internet connection, whenever, I would do something on my iPhone that required the internet I would have to disable wifi so it would utilize the 3g network instead
My third and final attempt (so far!).
Something I had tried before and in all honesty the easiest solution. In the past I had purchased a bluetooth receiver and every few seconds the audio would make a popping sound or it would loose its connection to my iPhone so within about a day of driving to work I was so annoyed that I decided bluetooth just couldn’t handle music very well. Randomly, surfing the internet I happened upon a bluetooth audio receiver from Belkin that had some pretty good reviews, and it was only like $30. I purchased this device and snipped the power cable in half so I could mate it to a male usb plug that plugged into a usb cigarette adapter in my car. I then paired it with my iPhone and that was it. This allowed me to control music wirelessly in my car... exactly what I wanted!Pros
- Low cost ~ $30
- I can listen to music on my iPhone or use the Pandora app
- Super simple
- Bluetooth must be on or turned on when in the car
- Totally acceptable but not the greatest sound quality. It sounds pretty good, until you hear a song that you know has a lot of bass and you realize you aren’t hearing any of it.