Alpine CDA-9827 Car CD / MP3 Player

i bought this unit for the sole purpose of listeing to my ipod over the car speakers. It seemed like an economical choice at the time at 250 bucks from tweeter. It worked flawlessly for about 6 months. First problem, the ipod would continue to play after you shut off the car. Annoying but no big deal. Second problem, it will ruin your battery faster than apple can. Sucks, but i bought a mini for travel so now the ipod plays only in the car. Third problem, the ipod starts to take longer and longer to be recognized by the head unit. I had read that the ipod will not be recognized if it has a weak charge. I make sure the ipod is fully charged each time and this seems to help temporarily. Fourth problem, once the ipod finally is recognized by the head unit good luck selecting tracks. The unit goes into NO DATA mode. While it continues to play tracks you cannot access playlists or advance songs. The first call to Alpine was worthless. The guy told me he had never heard of this problem and that i had to "hard reset" my ipod. Ok great, first of all that is not even a valid term (search the web)anyway i figured out how to reset the ipod and i also restored it to the factory settings.. still no improvement. The second call was (hard to imagine) even more worthless. This guy never even mentioned the "hard reset" he just said that my head unit was an older model (18 monthes max!?!?!)and said that i could ship them the head unit to get fixed ($95, plus shipping, two weeks) or just buy a new one (after which he began extolling the virtues of the latest models). According to this good samaritan the problem is definitely with the head unit, he seemed to think that i should have expected this to happen. Thanks Alpine. (ps i expirienced the same problems with both my 2nd gen mini and my third gen dock ipod)