The iRiver AFT-100: Best Invention Ever?

Yes.

Even if you don't own an iRiver, you can make use of the iRiver AFT-100 Mobile FM Transmitter. I used to connect a CD player to Erica's tape deck in the car through one of those faux cassettes with the audio wire coming out the side.

Those things suck.

Inevitably, Erica's non-non-heinous car stereo would somehow figure out — my guess is by dark necromancy — that the tape in the deck was somehow less than genuine, and it considered this a serious infraction. It would unceremoniously spit out the tape with an E14 error on the display and switch back to playing whatever happened to be on the radio. This is not conducive to a good rockin' out session:

CD Player: "...there's got to be a morning afterrr—"
Radio: "—where the grass is green and the girls are pretty, oh won't you please—"
CD Player: "—hold on to the niiiight, we'll find—"
Radio: "—the chair of the city gas chamber—"

It's not a problem when it happens once: you push the tape back in and move on with your life. But when it happens every couple of seconds, that's just no way to listen to music. So Erica and I went looking for an FM transmitter we could plug into the cigarette lighter socket in her car. There are plenty of devices on the market that do the job, but they all seemed to eat AAA batteries at a furious rate: the previous one we owned craved them like a drug, only worked with four fixed stations, and, oh yeah, the plug literally severed the wires and fell off. That was the end of that.

Eagle-eyed Erica spotted the iRiver AFT-100 in Best Buy, so I snapped it up immediately and we used it in the car on the way home. It was totally worth the retail price. This thing takes no batteries and will work on just about any FM station you can think of. This way, no matter where you are you can find a quiet FM station, set the transmitter accordingly, and if you want you can program that station into one of the three preset buttons on the front.

Now for the bad news: this thing is pricey and I haven't yet found a way to fix its deteriorated sound quality: everything I play over the AFT-100 sounds very warm and fuzzy. You know, radioesque. I'll live with it though because, wouldn't you know it, this thing works and cassette adapters don't.