I recently acquired an Acronova Nimbie USB Plus NB21-DVD to automate portions of some CD and DVD projects I’ve been working on. This has worked great on Windows 7, but on OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) I was unable to get QQGetTray to work. This software faciliates programs which support action-on-insert and eject-on-completion to work with the Nimbie autoloaders by detecting ejections (via tray opening) and triggering disc changes. Thus, it’s pretty important…
So, how does one make this work? Use a USB 2.0 cable instead of the provided USB 3.0 cable.
How did I find this workaround? After a bunch of searching and digging it just happened to be buried in a response from Acronova in the Customer Questions and Answers on the NB21-DVD’s Amazon page:
The new OS X El captain has changed the way it handles USB 3. In the meantime, instead of using the included blue USB 3 cable, use a USB 2 cable to operate Nimbie under USB 2.0 mode.
By Acronova on December 1, 2015
While writing this post I received a reply to a support ticket I opened with Acronova saying the same thing, and further messages indicated that the QQGetTray developers are still working on the issue.
Frustrating, and surprising, but it works. This workaround is not mentioned anywhere on the product’s site or knowledge base, nor is there any info listed about a fix for QQGetTray. While this keeps the drive from being able to rip at full USB 3.0 speeds, I can deal with this compromise in order to get a toolchain working to avoid manually swapping discs.
The symptoms are that OS X successfully sees the optical drive via a USB 3.0 SATA bridge, was also seeing a USB 2.0 device called NT21, yet QQGetTray would report “Status: No devices found” and fail to actuate the loader mechanism. This was on a Late 2014 iMac with Retina display, model ID iMac15,1, running Mac OS X 10.11.2. When connected via a USB 2.0 cable (instead of the provided blue USB 3.0 cable) the optical drive is then seen as hanging off the internal USB 2.0 hub along with the NT21 device. It all then runs as USB 2.0, and QQGetTray works properly.
Thanks! Where do I get the usb 2 cable that matches the port on the device itself as it’s of an irregular shape.