Xazy

My friend has a regular cd player and radio in his car and would like to somehow to play mp3s on his stereo in the car for different educational content. He tried the ipod player that transmits over a radio frequency, but with very poor results. Would love any ideas or tips for doing it, outside of getting a new stereo with mp3 capabilities, would love any potential ideas or thoughts.

YaWhateva

most radios in newer cars have what's called an auxiliary input to plug in an mp3 player. it just kinda looks like a headphone jack that says AUX. If your friends stereo has one of those, he can just buy and auxiliary cable and plug it in from the mp3 player to the AUX plug. If he doesn't have one, the only thing I can think of is the radio transmitters that he's already tried.

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Bear Cub

FM Modulator. Allows you to plug in an external source, and splices inline with the antenna input and back of the receiver. Turn to the preset channel on the radio, and it works pretty good. The transmission strength of the radio transmitters is now regulated, so they're basically worthless. Almost everyone who gets Sirius-XM in their cars now that's not OEM equipped will use an FM modulator when no aux input is available.

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boink

if you don't have an aux input you could buy an equalizer with aux input.

or burn your mp3's to a CD

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yournamehere

If you have an older radio, they make adapters that have a microjack at one end; and a cassette tape at the other. I have an old adapter from before I had a CD player in my truck - it came with my portable CD player, which allowed me to play CDs thru my cassette player. It has the same output jack size as an MP3 player.

One word of warning, though - they will only work for about 20 minutes or so if your cassette player has auto-rewind (was disappointed to discover that!) - after that, it will keep spitting the tape out. After all, since the "cassette" has a wire attached to it at one end, you can't turn it over and put it back in.
So, in this case, the older the radio; the better the chance of success. Well, as long as it's new enough to have the cassette slot positioned to put the cassette in from the side.

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shakran

generally the auto rewind can be switched off, as can auto-program-search, which gets very annoying when you're doing a converter "tape."

Hektore

Never ran into the auto rewind problem though, Mine will just play and play and play.

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telekinetic

I bought at $10 FM modulator that takes one AAA battery at Wal Mart. It works great with my ipod...comes in as clear as the radio in four or five different cars.

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yournamehere

Thanks - that's good to know - I'll give it a try.

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If you want to avoid 95% of internet spelling errors:
"If your ridiculous pants are too loose, you're definitely going to lose them. Tell your two loser friends over there that they're going to lose theirs, too."
It won't hurt your fashion sense, either.

Daniel_

iPod+ iTrip = iSing-a-long

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boink

this is pretty cool if you ask me. basically an mp3 player shaped like a cassette. your car player makes it work via the cassette sprockets, or you can plug in headphones and work it with it's buttons.
Tape MP3 Player+PC Card Reader+Car Cassette Adapter+ SD - eBay (item 220420737967 end time May-26-09 21:48:57 PDT)

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when you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain't the way.

Cynosure

I've read in/on more than one media hardware magazine/website that these mp3-to-car-radio converters don't work so well.

But, hey, if it works for you, then that's all that matters.