Maintronics digital audio player for BMW cars is the result of a fortunate combination: Maintronic had a state-of-the-art MP3 player for its studio products and the years of BMW I-BUS language experience of Mr. Tobias Weber. Those involved experienced the rather common breakdown of the original CD-changer. Sometimes repairable but usually not a really long lasting solution. Besides, music on CD's is something of the eighties, especially for the hars environment of an automobile today we have better solutions. So the concept of the digital music player combined with the car's native language for control was born.

During the summer of 2009 a number of these players were distributed as beta-devices among BMW enthusiasts. Various car models, model years, configurations and types of drivers were driving along with the new device on board. Like myself, most testers were happy from the very start: high quality sound, very fast response to commands and fully integrated so the existing buttons on radio and steering wheel for control.

As a direct replacement of the CD changer, the CP600BMW became an extrodinary good alternative for the changer. Issues that occured during the beta phase like the Traffic Program function reducing the volume after the announcement were ironed out.

As the product became better known, more feature requests started to emerge. As the 6 CD capacity is replaced by the contents of an SD card with hundreds or thousands of songs/albums a logical request came forward:  ID3TAG display. In itself this proved quite feasible as the RDS function of various radios could be used. In fact, even the instrument cluster could be provided with information in the matrix display. A unique and very much appreciated feature. The multitude of models and model years with various software versions turned out to be a bit of a challenge though: over the years so many variations had been used in the long lifetime of the I-BUS system that some unwanted side effects occured when displaying and processing commands through the car's communication system.

Currently (summer 2010) we are confident to say that all major issues have been solved. And minor ones are known.

For the readers of this English text: the radio models BM23 and the like that were not made for RDS display, are also not capable of displaying TAG information. As a replacement of the changer, the CP600BMW is reported to function fine with these radios, it's just that no TAG's are displayed. Just like the changer it replaces.