A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
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A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
A couple of days ago I noticed that 22 years before that, I had complained that one of two gizmos had proved a total bust. The Griffin iTrip was designed to transmit music from an iPod to a nearby FM receiver. I’m sure it worked, somewhere, but here in Rome there simply was no sufficient gap in the FM spectrum for it to find a spot where it wasn’t outcompeted by big bad (unlistenable) radio.
In those days, best beloved, of course we owned the music we listened to, or at the very least a friend of a friend owned it and was willing to share the rip. No streaming service existed to salve our consciences and really rip musicians off. So if you wanted to listen to your music from your iPod on the road, you either had a radio with an auxiliary input into which you plugged a cable, far the best option, or you looked for some kind of gizmo.
The weirdest of these were the cassette adapters. You put one into the car’s cassette player and plugged the other end into your source, probably some kind of MP3 player. A friend had one, and the sound quality was appalling, which was why I paid for the iTrip. I was amazed to discover that these still exist and can be bought, and there are even Bluetooth versions, which seems bizarre beyond understanding. But that is a digression.1
My main point is that as I was reading my 22-year-old ramblings, I was listening to my music, safely stored a couple of hundred kilometres away at home, and I was doing so through the magic of Navidrome, Tailscale and an iOS app called Amperfy. Once set up, it just works. This is not a geeky guide to how to set it up; there are plenty of those, and there really is nothing to it. I’ve been using the combination since March last year and it has probably contributed more to my listening pleasure since than anything else. I haven’t needed it in the car, and perhaps it might not cope with hopping from cell tower to cell tower, but it wouldn’t have to, because you can download and cache any tunes for playing when wifi is patchy or expensive or simply unavailable.
As I recall, I solved the problem if the iTrip by replacing the car radio with one that did have an auxiliary input. The Griffin Powermate — the other device mentioned in that piece — was an absolute gem that I would have loved to get working with my digital editing software, but it was not to be. ↩
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