Listening to Streaming iTunes in My Car

Last night while driving around town I was listening to music streaming from my iTunes music library located at home over my car radio. How did I do that?

First of all, I recently purchased the Griffin iTrip AutoPilot iPhone/iPod FM Transmitter. This device, pictured above, broadcasts audio from an iPhone or iPod to an open FM channel on your car’s FM stereo radio. It even has a SmartScan function that picks out the three best frequencies to use and saves them. Most importantly to me, it will charge an iPhone 3G. It’s a little finicky regarding optimal placement within the car to get the strongest possible signal to the car’s radio, but once you find the proper location it’s a real breeze to use.

To get iTunes music streamed over 3G to my iPhone, I use the amazing Simplify Media application. It enables my iPhone to play any music that is on my home computer (I happen to have my music stored on Chocolate Shake, my Asus Eee 1000h) by having it streamed to the iPhone over WiFi, 3G, or even Edge. It even displays all my playlists, and can view artist bios and song lyrics. I say it can stream from my home computer, but it can actually do more than that. It can also stream from up to 30 friends’ computers if they have the free Simplify Media server installed on their machines, too. (Clarification: I just found out that music purchased from the iTunes store is blocked from playing on an iPhone, although at least one of my purchased albums slipped through Simplify Media’s filter, which is why I didn’t immediately notice this. So you can’t play all of your iTunes music on an iPhone, just music you’ve ripped into iTunes.)

This is an incredably handy feature for me. Since I have quite a large video and music collection stored on iTunes, I’ve had to split it up between my iPod Touch and iPhone 3G. The iPhone contains all of my video files, while the Touch contains all of my music. The Touch normally sits at home where it serves up music over my in-home wireless speaker setup. With Simplify Mediia I can now listen to all of my music on my iPhone, too, even though none of it is actually stored on that device.

So that’s how I managed to be listening to streaming iTunes music over my car’s radio last night. Isn’t mobile technology wonderful!