Since the recent demise of my iPod, I've returned to poking around at pre-iPod strategies for listening to podcasts in my car. Hopefully, the little thing will be returned good-as-new from AppleCare-land within the next few days. But until then, I'm left with what I can do using the Blaupunkt MP3 CD player in my 2004 Ford Focus.

The closest I've come to anything usable is burning MP3 CD's from iTunes playlists, in combination with some applescript to make paper CD cases that list all the podcasts on the disc.

Not too shabby, other than the fact that this approach would eventually leave me with a large pile of paper-encased CDR's to either archive or toss. But, even considering archival, it's a bit wasteful since I never really have 650MB worth of new podcasts accumulated at convenient times—and even if I did, that'd be quite a lot to listen to.

I've tried burning multi-session CDs so as to use up all the space before moving onto the next blank. However, that just results in the MP3 CD player recognizing only the first session. I really would like to reuse a handful of CDRW's for a temporary sneakernet. But alas, it seems my Blaupunkt MP3 CD unit won't read from CDRW's—at least, not the ones I have on hand.

But, I do have to say that these MP3 CD's sound a hell of a lot better than my old Griffin iTrip FM transmitter sounded. :)