It looks like Pioneer might be following Alpine’s lead and making an iPod adapter for their car stereos. I couldn’t find any info about it anywhere, but if you look close at the AVIC-N1 specs on Pioneer’s website, it has a little note saying it’s “iPod Adapter Ready”. Hmmm… interesting.
I hope more and more companies start making iPod car adapters. I have an iTrip, and it’s awesome, but a car adapter would be so much nicer.
That would be nice. Hopefully they can make it better than Alpine did. Alpine’s SUCKS! I ordered it, installed it, tried to use their crappy interface, and resold it all within a week.
I’m just really not sure Alpine even tests the crap they produce. Buy it, I dare you. Then try to get to a specific song somewhere near the middle of your collection. I don’t presume to have a big cd collection but according to the manual, the Alpine adapter can’t scroll past 251 albums, artists, or songs. That’s crap. Never mind that if I wanted to get to #250 I’d be scrolling FOREVER because their knobs aren’t speed sensitive. I got to the Bs in my collection before I started swearing and gave up. Or try to play a playlist in ANY particular order. God or someone above him only knows what their software does but I know I wasn’t on M.I.X. mode but I had no clue what song would show up next. Then there’s the software error when I was selecting Albums I think where the album < above > the album selected/flashing was the one that was chosen when I hit the select button.
I could go on. My point is, even on the clearest day on the straightest road, you’ll still want to drive off a cliff trying to find a song. If you don’t care what song happens to play and never hope to, this is your hardware. If you absolutely have to use an Alpine head unit (I’m considering trashing mine just because I’m fed up with their ineptitude–I tried playing mp3 cds as well and gouged my eyes out) then get their aux input adapter for like $60 that lets you plug RCA jacks into the Ai-Net. No gold plugs though.
Don’t buy Alpine.
Couldnt agree with the above post more. I ordered the alpine 9831 and the ipod adapter. Had it all installed christmas day, and i uninstalled it yesterday. Couldnt stand it anymore. The head unit is even pretty dissapointing. Looking forward to what Pioneer may have to offer.
I got the neo ion http://www.mp3yourcar.com – it directly connects the iPod to the stock deck. I really like it and it works way better then my friends Alpine adapter.
I recently purchased the Pioneer iPod interface and had it installed for my AVIC-D1. I’m not familiar with the Alpine interface but I doubt the Pioneer is much better. There is no function to search for the song and you only get a 1 line display that just displays the first 6 characters of either the artist or song. I have approximately 300 CDs on my iPod and to browse past the Es or Ds is a tedious task and then it plays the songs by particular artists in a random order, not by the order they are on the album. Very disappointing considering the AVIC-D1 head unit and it’s capabilities with XM radio and navigation. It’s obvious that Pioneer rushed this into production to meet consumer demand and the iPod explosion.
if you unplug the ipod and then search scroll for the song you want then you can plug it back in and it will play
there is a blue wire you can disconnect in the pionner ipod adapter so you can scroll through your music using your ipod instead of the headunit