How to listen to podcasts in the car: road-tested tools for podcast listening
You want to listen to podcasts on the go, but your car isn’t Bluetooth-equipped. Welcome to my world. When not writing about podcasting my day job has me driving over 1,200 miles a week in a variety of different work vehicles that have one thing in common: no Apple Car, no fancy Bluetooth functionality. Just a hunk of car staring back at me. Luckily for all of us, there are a few affordable options at the traveling podcast fan’s disposal, and I’m going to run you through the three that have served me best! Along the way I’m also going to give some pointers on common teething troubles one might encounter. Rest assured that all three gadgets discussed in this list are items I’ve not only tried, I’ve spent many hours on the highway with them.
Aux Cable
Ah, the old standby. There’s not much to explain here, this humble cable is so ingrained in pop culture there are memes dedicated to aux cable ownership. Purchase a 3.5mm AUX cable, plug one end into the car stereo, the other into your phone. Boom, direct audio link to the car. Congratulations, you’re in.
Pros:
Affordable. You can pick up an AUX cable for under ten dollars USD. Pick an online retailer at random and you’re likely to find a decent cable for a good price.
Prolific: You’ll be hard-pressed to find a Walmart or Target around that doesn’t have (admittedly overpriced) cables in stock.
Simple: There are only three possible points of failure. If an AUX jack isn’t working it’s the car’s port, the cable itself, or your phone’s port. That’s it. No firmware updates or local radio frequencies can muck anything up. It’s just a cable.
Cons:
Snagging hazard: This might not seem like a huge deal at first, but after a few months of flinging a phone around the cab I found it’s not uncommon for an errant item in the cab to hit the cable and rip the cable out (if not send the phone flying).
Easily damaged: Avoid excessive unplugging/jerking the cable out at all costs. I’ve driven vans where the aux input has been abused to the point where the cable has to be positioned just so or a connection isn’t made. I had flashbacks to holding a TV antenna just so to get a decent picture in the late 90s. Nobody should have to live through that.
Incompatible with older cars: While easy for automakers to implement, the aux input didn’t become a feature found in standard-model cars until the late 00s/early 10s when our phones became portable media hubs.
Tips:
Socially it’ll help keep people in the back seat entertained by allowing them to pipe their own podcasts and music into the stereo. Personally you’ll never find yourself awkwardly balancing the phone on a cup holder trying to keep it close enough to a power outlet to charge while also playing the newest episode of Critical Bits.
Killing the mystery buzz
If you’re charging your phone and using the aux cable at the same time there are some car models, for whatever reason, that have poorly insulated/oversensitive aux ports that’ll pick up an annoying hum from the ever-so-tiny circuit you create by charging the phone and having the aux cable plugged in. Either charge your phone using a battery pack or consider buying a slightly more expensive insulated aux cable (fair warning, that’s something I overheard on an automotive forum, I’ve not tried this personally).
Aux cassette adaptor
It’s time to upgrade that old radio to the 21st century by slotting in one of the coolest adaptations of old tech I’ve ever seen. This cassette tape with a tail just pops into any cassette deck in any car, leaving the aux cable dangling out for you to plug your phone into. Easy-peasy.
Pros:
A simple retrofit: All it takes is a few bucks at a local big box retail shop and you’ve turned your 1985 Honda Civic into a podcasting machine. No mods, no finagling with radio frequencies.
Cheap: Slightly more than your average aux cable, but you can expect to pick up one in a local box retailer between $10 and $15. I’d advise not spending less than $10, which seems to be the bottom floor before you get into “this might be complete garbage” territory.
Low footprint: Unless you really want to pop in that old Captain & Tennille album again, cassette aux comes with the bonus of not taking up any extra space or power outlets in the car, like an FM modulator.
Cons:
Low-quality audio: I’ve experienced a handful of different cassette aux models in varying price points and makes. None of them came without the inherent hiss that comes from analog tape. If you’re going to use this, stick to chat-casts and fiction shows with very little in the way of sound effects or music.
Incompatible with 40 years of car models: The aux cassette is cursed by the advance of technology from analog to digital in the late 1980s. Any car built past then rocks a CD player, making the aux cassette useless.
Tips:
Get an aux cable anyway
No, you read that right. The cable coming out of a lot of these converters is relatively short, so you can make up the difference by purchasing a male-to-female aux cable to act as an extension.
Clean your player
There are plenty of YouTube tutorials and cheap kits online that can help you clean 30 years of grime off the player heads in your car’s well-loved cassette player. Running a cleaning tape might help out the audio quality of the aux adapter!
FM Modulator
If you’ve ever dreamed of running a pirate radio station, this little guy can make your dreams come true. Sure, your radio station transmits a few feet at most but hey, it’s something. FM Modulators take a Bluetooth signal (or direct AUX input in some cases) and transmit it over a FM frequency that you have your car radio tuned to.
Pros:
No wires: Nobody’s getting tangled, nothing’s getting yanked out, just smooth podcast sailing.
Charging: Most modulators come with the bonus of USB charging ports that allow you to charge your phone while still using the power outlet to power the FM transmission.
Works in any car with a radio: If your car was built after 1960 you have a dedicated power outlet or an old-school cigarette lighter that also works as a power outlet. That’s all you need to start your tiny station!
Cons:
Useless in large cities. The utility of an FM modulator is defined by whether or not an area has enough empty space on the FM dial for you to slot in your tiny radio station. If you live in a major metropolitan area where the airwaves are packed full of actual radio stations you’ll never find a good station (e.g. radio-locator.com’s three top picks for New York City empty signals are all rated “bad” due to bleed-over from existing stations).
Takes up a power outlet. While seemingly a no-brainer, using an FM modulator effectively deletes a power outlet from the car every time you drive. While this is fine if it has a USB port to charge your devices from, that doesn’t help any devices you might have that run off a power outlet (e.g. a dedicated GPS). If you drive a car that has more than one power outlet this isn’t as big of a deal, but it’s still worth asking yourself “do I use this for other things semi-regularly?”
Weird phone interactions: All three of these I’ve owned over the years had their own unique quirks and downsides on how they interact with different models of phone. My current modulator (paired to a Moto G Android phone) seems to hate when one audio file tries to play over Podcast Addict, as all text notifications (or worse: Google Maps directions) that play during a podcast mute all audio. It also HATES voice messages sent on Facebook messenger for some reason. My fiance’s phone (a slightly different Android) has zero problems. Your mileage may vary, but it’s better to know this going in.
Tips:
Plan ahead for road trips. If you’re traveling a few hours in one direction there’s a likelihood you’ll enter the broadcast radius of a station that conflicts with the frequency you normally use at home. Last month my home frequency quickly became crowded while I was driving through a stretch of farmland that also happened to be a signal dead zone for my cell provider, so I couldn’t just pull up radio-locator and find a new frequency. Learn from my mistake, look up frequencies for your destination before leaving.
Consider your phone’s health. One of the downsides to FM Modulators being so cheap to produce on a technical level is there are plenty of models built using knock-off designs to take advantage of cheap mass production in China. If you’ve spent any amount of time watching electricians like Big Clive disassemble cheap electronics on YouTube, you’re already well aware that the cheaper something is, the less trustworthy it is as a phone charger. If you have your everyday charger and a second power outlet in your car that’s not being used, I’d advise charging from that just to be on the safe side. The chance of something going catastrophically wrong and frying your phone is almost non-existent, but it sure would suck for your phone to be the one that beats the average.
What makes a good podcast for car listening?
Now this is very important to consider: Not all podcasts will sound good in a car. I was under the impression that I didn’t like certain kinds of shows or genres when I first started reviewing podcasts. Then I took my first vacation and listened to a few at home and found I actually liked them. The problem stemmed from the fact that 90% of my listening was done in a moving work vehicle. When audio has to fight tire noise, the sound of pavement rolling by, objects rattling in the cab, and the general low quality of standard-issue van speakers it can lose a lot of richness.
Most big-name podcasts are mixed either specifically for radio broadcast or are produced by people who cut their teeth making audio for radio. Criminal, 99% Invisible, and Radiotopia all sound pretty good in a moving car thanks to this. Two of the three are actually aired on NPR with the foreknowledge they’ll mainly be listened to by drivers, the other is mixed by an NPR expat.
When you get into the indie podcasting sphere things get a little trickier. There are some audio drama shows with phenomenal sound design that sound like hot garbage when aired through a car speaker. This doesn’t write off sound-designed shows in general, though. Some producers like Fool & Scholar’s Travis Vengroff purposefully play their edits through not-great speakers (in Vengroff’s case an onboard laptop speaker) to make sure the mix is up to snuff. Podcasts like Girl in Space, The White Vault, 20 Sided Stories, and Archive 81 all are mixed well enough the majority of the intended design comes through.
As a rule of thumb: Don’t write off heavily-designed audio drama, but I would also recommend not setting out on the trip without having some backup podcasts in your pocket just in case. That said, if a show is good but the mix requires you to keep cranking the volume up and down… it’s time to listen to someone else. Your hearing is more important than listening to that podcast at that exact moment, and I’ve been put in actual pain by a podcast that had really muffled voice tracks but then dropped a sharp sound effect out of nowhere.
Podcasts that are primarily a couple of people talking about a topic are going to sound good while driving 99% of the time. Interviews, chat shows, lightly-edited true crime, it’ll all work. Whether it’ll keep your attention as the miles roll on is up to the podcast itself.
Congratulations, you’re now a certified podcasting road warrior. You’re better prepared to get from point A to B without a single dull moment. Go queue up some podcasts and watch those miles blur past. Have fun, drive safe, call when you get there.
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