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Last year I bought myself an IPOD video for myself for Christmas. It was a great gift that I really appreciated. However, for the last year I have been on a quest for good ipod integration with the factory radio in my BMW 325i.

I started with a Dension ICE-Link. Which turned out to be a real problem. I bought it on Ebay to save a few bucks, which might have been part of the problem. But it was supposed to give me steering wheel track control/volume control, names of songs dispalyed on my LCD on the radio, and of course good quality audio integration. Anyway it worked for about two weeks, then everything buy audio stopped working. Eventually I started getting really wierd stuff happening like my break lights staying on constantly and not being able to activate my cruise control. Rather than screw up something that costs a lot of money to fix I removed it.

Then I moved to a DLO MicroDock. This is a FM transmitter type of solution. It honestly worked great. I have recommended it to several friends which have also bought them. However, it was a cluttered and labour intensive solution. Always having to plug in and unplug the trasmitter to the lighter socket (which I only have one in a 325i so couldn’t charge a cell and listen to ipod at the same time), and such got old. There was a little engine noise in the signal at low volume, but normally I couldn’t even really hear it. It is definately one of the best FM transmitters I have heard of, none of the typical problems I hear from other FM transmitters.

This weekend I was at Best Buy and had a gift card I had gotten for Christmas burning a whole in my pocket. As I walking around geek heaven I noticed an ipod adapter specifically for BMWs. It was the direct integration style like I had started with, however, it couldn’t do the song name on the LCD display. I decided I would give it a try and forked over the $99 required to Best Buy. Installation was a breeze (after doing this twice I am an expert and removing a BMW interior) and so far it works and sounds great. It also came with a cradle for the ipod, so I am back to my nice non-cluttered interior.

Only time will tell if this will be my final solution. If this one ends up causing problems I will either buy a new car (which I have been considering anyway) or get the official BMW integrator ($150 list).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Cars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.