External 3.5 floppy drive not mounting on MacBook Pro

Based on a quick search it seems Akai uses a proprietary floppy disk format...

"Akai floppy disks are formatted as 2 sides of 80 tracks with 5 or 10 sectors per track. Each sector is 1024 bytes long, giving a total of 800k (low density) or 1600k (high density). PCs use 9 or 18 sectors of 512 bytes and will not read Akai floppies without reprogramming. As far as I can tell, Mac floppy drives can't read Akai floppy disks at all."

...that might be readable with some PC-only add-ons like OmniFlop:

http://www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm

When I plug the drive in I hear it spin but I do not see it mount. If I go in Disk Utility It does not see the drive either. In the You Tube video it shows the drive come up ONLY when a 3.5 DISK is inserted.

All of that is completely correct, normal and expected behavior.

The disks I have were formatted using an Akai S950 sampler from the 90's which have .snd files on them.

Don't know whether any recent macOS version can play .snd files though. It was the original Macintosh format for audio (sound) files.

The particular floppy disk format will also be a factor, but Disk Utility ought to at least recognize when readable media is inserted, even if it does not recognize its format.

I just connected my SmartDisk VST 3.5 in Floppy drive to my M4 Mac Mini Pro (26.1) via a StarTech USB-C hub. I am using a USB to USB-C adapter in it. The drive power light winks on and then off, but the device does not appear on the Desktop. That will only occur after I insert a compatible 1.4 MB floppy disk into it. Keyword here is compatible.

This is the floppy drive that I originally purchased for my 1999 G3 iMac DV SE.