iTrip

September 22, 2003 at 12:00 AM in

The iTrip is an ultra low power FM transmitter for the iPod. It attaches on the top of the iPod, mimicking the iPod's style, and draws power through the headphone socket. It lets you broadcast your music anywhere on the FM dial, for about three meters. It's designed primarily for use in cars.

It's brilliant.

I have a new old car that has a radio and a tape deck that you don't put anything you care about into. I was going to try my Sony cassette adapter, but I'd gotten a little nervous that it might get damaged. Also, the cables looked like they were going to be a problem. Problem solved. I've tuned both the car and iTrip to 106FM, now my music collection is playable in the car, with no plugging or unplugging. Heck, the iPod can be in a bag in the back seat as long as it's on.

It's ingenious.

The iTrip has no buttons. You tune it to a particular frequency by playing one of the bundled MP3s -- one for each 0.1 of a frequency increment. I was worried that if one of these files came up in the random shuffle of my normal songs that the iTrip would switch frequencies. Not so. Unless you specifically stop the track in the middle (there's about 3 seconds of silence), the iTrip will not switch frequencies. If you let the track play to the end, then the iTrip receives a sort of cancel instruction.

One effective test to see if a product is, on the whole, good or bad is to see if it inspires you to, respectively, do or not do something else. When I bought my iPod it encouraged me to once and for all properly tag my ripped MP3 files. Similarly the iTrip has encouraged me to sort out how playlists work. (That's because there are some tunes that are "car safe" and some that aren't.) It also encouraged me to hook up the FM antenna on my Yamaha Stereo Receiver (which hadn't been used as a radio since it was last moved almost a year ago).

In addition to my vehicle-related enjoyment, I've been trying to get a tiny FM receiver that just wraps round one ear. Now that's tricky. The best I've come up with is the "Hit Clips Micro Personal Player", which unfortunately can't be purchased without an RIAA tune-on-a-chip such as *NSYNC's "Pop" (why they'd use audio compression so bad that it makes their cookie-cutter musical acts sound even more identical is beyond me), but since the device was drastically reduced to clear I hope that no more than a few cents finds its way to the Root of all Evil (TM).

Any iPod owner with a desire to listen to their music collection in the car would do well to purchase the iTrip.