iPod

For a short time in my life I was commuting two hours three times a week, there and back! Four hours on the road each day, it was terrible. To sooth the pain I bought an after-market Panasonic cd/mp3 player. It was great for it's day, I could load up a CD full of mp3's and listen to my heart's content. It sure beat flipping through stations or bringing along ton's of CD's.

But the iPod eclipsed the mp3 CD player in a big way. I can put all my music on a little device that maintains all kinds of good metadata, playlists and more; it is convenient and a lot less bulky than traditional CD players. But my nice, shiny aftermarket deck didn't have an easy way to integrate the iPod. The deck contains Cd changer controls but there must be an active Panasonic changer before you can even select the inputs.

Then there was a glimmer in the distance, other people had the same problem and one cunning individual made an emulator that communicated with the deck to make it think a player was present. I excitedly order one of the emulators and a Belkin AutoKit to further my integration madness.

Two problems with my iPod Nano in rapid succession worries me that my nano may be on it's way out. A day after the last problem I had, the nano's line out (via the dock) stopped working. After a hard reset it came back and seems to be working.

I have a first generation 4GB Nano and it stopped working today. It played music fine but when ever I plugged it into my Mac it would say that the iPod is corrupt and that I need to restore the software. When I try to restore the software through iTunes 7, it churns on it for awhile and then says that it can't restore the software.

So having an iPod is cool and having a ride is cool. Now it is supremely cool if they work well together. My stipulations here are:

1. Seemless audio integration with the radio. I don't care if the controls on the deck control the iPod
2. The iPod must use the line out from the iPod dock adapter
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Audible is a great service and they have a nice format that is flexible, but sometimes it just isn't flexible enough. I have an mp3 player in my truck that I wanted to use, doesn't support .aa or drm for that matter. I certainly didn't want to burn them to however many cd's it would take, so I started scouring the web for ways to convert this file to a usable format.

Most of the sites I found recommended playing the book and recording the stream, then compress that to mp3. This is a silly idea and is wholely uesless to me, work though it may. I did, however, find instructions to convert .aa using dbpoweramp on a forum that I can no longer find. To preserve these instructions I will post them here as well.