Music M8

I like to think CD ripping is a simple business, you send, we rip, you get the music. But this week has been chaotic.

First, we had two clients who underestimated the number of CDs they had. So we were expecting 500 and then 400, we actually got 1800 in total. Not a major problem but it did put us behind, and we had to dip into the overtime budget.

Then client number two, with 800 CDs rang to ask if we could copy his music onto his new Xiva Music M8. OK, but my little heart sinks at the thought. I have dabbled with this machine before and I have to say it isn’t my favourite. I unplugged the ethernet connected Iomega drive we’ve been using and replaced it with the Xiva. So off I go trying to copy the files from one of our drives to a shiny new Xiva box. The instructions say you should just type musicm8 into the address bar in your browser.

Failed. Safari seems determined to hop off to the internet and finds that some clever ISP in Holland has grabbed the domain as a .com. Couldn’t get at the box that way so tried the other local variant Xiva suggest. No luck there either, nor via the SMB command from Apple’s Finder.

Then I remembered an issue we’d had years ago with another project that involved CD ripping to a NAS drive and I swapped the ethernet cable installed already for the cable that came with the Xiva box. Bingo! Still couldn’t get there with musicm8 but the SMB route in Finder worked fine. At last the data is flowing from our simple USB drive across the LAN and into the Xiva Music M8.