Parting Out With Oleg - Day 3

Today's item on the list is the iPod adapter from Audio Link. This is one hot little item that everyone has approved of so far. The install is fairly straight forward, but best to do with two people to make sure you don't accidentally drop the head unit.

Long story short, you're going to pull out the head unit. click here to see the pictures of what that involves, but when removing the head unit, on the driver side in the back, there is a 10mm bolt. Be SURE to remove that, otherwise your day will be ruined. There is a circuit board there and tugging out the head unit without removing the bolt, you'll destroy that board... Which is the board to your climate controls, radio, almost anything electrical in the car. When you get the head unit out, you'll see the connector in the rear at the upper right (If looking at it by holding it with rear in front of you). Plug it in and you're good to go, just place the head unit back in.We velcro taped the actual adapter under the ashtray as there was plenty of room to spare. We tugged and lopped the wire a bit for the plug, then wire tied it to some of the holes the clips for the center console go in. From there, we threaded the wire into the arm rest cup holder compartment and made sure there was a decent amount of wire, not so much that it was like spaghetti dinner in your armrest. After that, place the rest back together and you're golden. Depending on if you run in to difficulties disconnecting the connectors, this could take from 1 hr to 2 hr. Sadly, took us almost 3. The climate connectors did NOT want to come out.

After the labor from hell, I went through how to use and learn the beast. For starters, this really is the best way to go in terms of listening to music in the car. Turn it on by pressing CD on the radio twice. You will then see EX on the display. All the controls on your steering wheel work with the iPod, allowing you to not have to pick up the iPod and fiddle around while driving. There are two modes for the adapter. EX 1 is a type of dummy mode. It will say track 66 at time 0 and start counting up. That allows you to play whatever you want from the iPod, controlling it from the iPod or cycling through all the tracks by pressing next track. It basically acts as a dock for the iPod. EX 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are play list mode. The adapter supports up to 5 play lists. You switch each play list or back to mode 1 by using the Disc up or Disc down button. Playlist 1 would be of course EX 2, and so on. In Playlist mode though, you DO NOT have control of your iPod. I personally prefer playlist mode because I preset everything on my iTunes before listening to my iPod. Makes it easier to go to a playlist and play the genre of music you want, as opposed to cycling through tracks randomly.