I use an old-school tape adapter in my car when I want to listen to my iPhone while I drive.  I live and drive in a heavily populated area, and the FM band is crammed full of stations, so the FM transmitters do not usually work very well for me.  Barring removing my antenna like my husband has done on his car, the only real solution is a tape adapter, since my 2003 model stereo does not feature a direct line-in.

It has always worked great, even back when I was rocking a Discman and oodles of mp3 CDs.  When I moved to the iPod, it continued to work perfectly.  However, since I started using my iPhone as both my phone and main source of music, I have run into a problem.

Every time something is plugged into the headphone jack, my iPod music starts to play.  It doesn’t matter if anything else might be supplying audio to the stereo, such as Pandora or last.fm.  It happens only with things that are non-Apple–I don’t experience it with the stock Apple earbuds at all.

Sometimes it helps if I start the other application (like Pandora), get the music playing, THEN plug in the tape adapter.  Other times nothing seems to help and I give up in frustration.  All I really want is to be able to listen to my awesome Pandora stations on my 30+ minute commute, is that so wrong?

Research I’ve done on the Internet has netted me plenty of gripes from other people with the same problem, but no actual solution.  According to what I’ve read, even Apple doesn’t really have a fix for it.  I don’t know if I should take my iPhone in and complain, or if I will have the same problem with another iPhone.  I suppose I should do it before the end of August, when my 1-year warranty runs out.

Is anyone else having the same problem?  Have you been able to fix it?  Inquiring tech divas want to know.