The Perils of Autoreverse

Like many individuals, I own an iPod. And, like many individuals, I like to listen to my iPod while I’m driving. I refuse to put on my ear-buds while driving (unlike many motorists I’ve seen), so I bought an iTrip FM transmitter by Griffin. It worked well for a long time until I ultimately broke it by dropping my iPod numerous times during sharp turns.

I became very jealous of a friend of mine who installed an auxiliary input in his car for using his iPod, and I thus wanted to partake in this project. Being the least savvy about cars and stereo equipment, this idea was quelched quickly.

I already have a tape deck in my car stereo, so I decided to just use a regular old cassette adapter. This is just a cassette that has a cord that plugs into your iPod. You then can play your iPod through your tape deck.

At first, this worked great. It sounded much better than the FM transmitter, and it didn’t eat up my iPod battery while transmitting. But after about four weeks of great use (conveniently after my receipt from Target expired), things starting malfunctioning. My tape deck would begin to try to reverse the tape, as if it were a regular tape that reached the end of one side. At first it only happened occasionally; about every few songs. But then the frequency increased to about almost every thirty seconds. I was getting infuriated.

But then I did a search on Google and found that others shared my plight.

I found one forum that suggested that I take apart my cassette-adapter and remove the “center wheel gear” and leave everything else as is. After fighting with the unscrewing the tiny tiny screws, I managed to take my adapter apart and remove the center wheel gear. Then I put it back together, hoping for success. But to my avail, I received failure. My tape deck didn’t even recognize it as a tape anymore. So I figured something was wrong.

I went back to Google and found a different forum where someone mentioned that I actually remove all the gears except the center wheel gear and the spindle teeth. After some more struggling with tiny screws (they are the bane of my existence), I put the center wheel gear back and removed the other three gears. This ended up being the correct procedure.

Apparently, the gears I removed somehow trip a sensor in my tape deck that the tape is at the end of a side, and thus needs to be autoreversed. So my tape deck kept thinking that my cassette-adapter was at the end of a side and kept wanting to switch the sides.

Now I can go back to blasting my music down the road and quickly turn it down when one of my guilty pleasure songs comes on my iPod (like Kelly Clarkson, or P!nk).

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Technorati: music, tape deck, cassette adapter, iPod, autoreverse, car stereo