Alpining the Ipod Experience

Almost the entire day today was spent installing my
new "Ipod Ready" Alpine stereo system. The good news
is that when I got the entire 20+ piece re-assembly of
the dashboard finished and realized I hadn't connected
the FM antenna, it went much faster the second time
around. The bad news is that Alpine's interpretation
of "Ipod Ready" means the following:

1) No auxiliary input jack for just using your Ipod
normally.

2) When you use the Ipod with it's Ipod connector, it
charges (which is cool) but it also completely
disables the Ipod's vastly superior interface in favor
of it's own.

Now, I haven't used the Alpine interface enough to
say that what I've basically done is paid a lot of
money to downgrade my ability to control my Ipod on my
car stereo, but it seems like that's very possible.
If so, I may be taking the fucker back for yet another
go around. However, insofar as it does work, giving
you the ability to quickly search by album, artist,
song title, etc, etc, etc, I suddenly find myself
caring about data hygiene. When my songs were simply
a sexily large number of files on my hard drive that I
could, at some point, theoretically listen to, I
didn't care that much that they weren't all indexed
with sufficient anality.

Now, suddenly, as I'm actually attempting not only to
*LISTEN* to them (new and exciting) but also to *FIND*
them using Alpine's esoteric interface, I do.