There's one out there that lets you control some of the iPod functions with the deck controls (FF, RW, I think).

FYI - I bought this the other day because I stupidly slammed my Monster adapter in the car door. I am not pleased with it. I think it'll end up with FM transmitters in the glove compartment.

What are the cons of it?

I need some regular expression help. My brain is a sieve when it comes to them?

How do I make part of a pattern an optional match? I'm dealing with something like this:

"%(^|\\s)mandatory textoptional text%me"

It's probably

"(^|\\s)mandatory text(optional text)?"

Let me give that a shot. And that reminds me, should do something about the disappearing slashes.

What are the cons of it?

The FF/REW function is sketchy at best. The sound quality is kinda weird in my car. It starts to sounds all crackle-y so I have to yank on the cord a bunch of times to get it to work correctly. A few minutes later, crackling again.

Plus I really need to be able to charge and play, which I wasn't thinking of when I bought it.

Excellent. That's a start. Now I have to work out how to deal with the disappearance of one of the parameters of the function called in the preg_replace section.

I really need to be able to charge and play, which I wasn't thinking of when I bought it.

I have a separate charger (sometimes I charge one, play the other, all the time admiring my diamond shoes) so that never occurred to me.

My current deck (forget the brand) gives an error in my tape deck intermittently. More than half the time it tries to play side B, side A, side B again and then ejects it. The one I have before that just gave up the ghost in terms of playing sound never had that mechanical problem.

The battery on my mini is going so I will run out of juice often. In which case, I plug the charger in the bottom and the adapter into the headphone jack. But, of course, since this one uses the bottom adapter, I can't do that here.

And that happens to me every once in a while with the monster adapter. From what i can tell, it occurs when I've first put it in to the tape deck (the adapter usually lives inside the tape deck. I only take it out when I'm going on a trip or something.) or when it's cold outside.

since this one uses the bottom adapter

Bugger. Of course. They need to fix that.

From what i can tell, it occurs when I've first put it in to the tape deck (the adapter usually lives inside the tape deck. I only take it out when I'm going on a trip or something.) or when it's cold outside.

For me, it's whenever I turn the stereo on.

Vaguely relatedly, I was listening to Kojo Nnamdi (on my iPod, so connected) where someone was bitching about CD rips losing fidelity.

I remember when the issue was CDs vs. LPs. Are we beyond that?