The iTrip is a piece of crap

Now Melissa and I have iPods. It'd be great to be able to have 40 gigs of tunes available in the car wouldn't it? So I looked around at the solutions and the big thing everyone kept mentioning as being a kick ass solution is this iTrip thing. The Apple store had them so I picked a couple up. It looks really cool. You just pop it on top of the iPod and it looks like it belongs. It emits an FM signal so you just tune your car stereo to the same station you set for the iTrip. Simple enough, eh?

I'm not sure how to proceed in articulating the stupidity of this unit from here. Hmm...

For starters, I couldn't try it out right when I got back to the car. You have to run the CD-ROM and install something or other so you can select the FM frequency. This is somewhat bewildering to me. This thing cost $35 and can't dial a radio frequency on it's own yet I can go get an AM/FM wrist watch with a calculator for 7 bucks. So much for instant gratification, I guess I'll have to wait until I get home to try it out. Brilliant.

So I get home and pop in the CD. It comes up with a %$##$% dialog box that says something lame like "Fatal error, you must have MusicMatch installed." What the heck is MusicMatch? My iPod came with iTunes. Actually, I know what MusicMatch is but I don't have it and it didn't get installed with my iPod. None of the new iPods install MusicMatch and note that the iTrip web site clearly states in bold print that "The New iTrip for the new iPods is NOW SHIPPING." Clearly they didn't test their solution with a new iPod. So I click on the Q&A link thinking they'd have my answer there. Nope, not there. Next, I try the support link and find a link to the updated iTrip manual. Surely this will tell me what to do. Nope. The setup instructions still tell me to pop in my CD and everything will work. A couple more clicks got me to this support article. Holy crap! These folks are smoking something good. There is a 13-step manual installation process for you to copy and paste files from the CD and then manually create a playlist. This is total amateur night.

Now I'm beginning to understand how this thing is going to work. You copy a separate MP3 file over for every radio frequency from 87.7 to 107.9 and the way you "tune" the iTrip is by playing the MP3 file corresponding to the frequency you want to try. Of course, it's not enough to just play the MP3 file, you must also stop playback of the file midway once the iTrip LED starts blinking. If you let the tuning song play all the way through it doesn't work (I found this out the hard way). This is just dorky.

At this point I'm now in the garage in the mini-van trying this out. I can't believe my ears. This thing sounds like crap. It is truly horrible. There is no stereo separation. It is noisy. There are no dynamics to the music at all. I tried multiple channels and two cars. No apparent help. Basically, this device sucks all that is good from the music and disposes of it. Then it spews a hobby-grade AM transistor radio quality signal.

This was discouraging. For the heck of it I tried one of those cassette adapter things. It sounds great. Who'd a thunk it?

Needless to say, the iTrips are going back. I already bought Melissa a cassette adapter for her car. We're all set!

Oh, one more stroke of brilliance from our iTrip friends. They have a program you can download to find free stations. You select a state and city and it gives you a list of available frequencies. I can't believe they actually ship a program down to you to do this. Wouldn't it be better to be a web page? Having an offline copy isn't going to be useful 6 months from now. I can't believe that someone thought this was a good idea.