There are many different ways to route audio using JackTrip's Audio Bridge. This is one fairly simple example to help get you started. Although this guide is for Ableton, the concepts are similar across most DAWs.
Before we get started, it may be helpful to point out that both Ableton and JackTrip have mechanisms to receive audio from your interface and send audio to your headphones. To help minimize confusion, it's often best to choose one or the other to perform each of these tasks. In this example, we will be using Ableton to generate a mix, and JackTrip to send audio to your headphones.
In JackTrip's audio settings, select the output device and channels that represent your headphones. Click the "Play Test Tone" button to make sure that you can hear clearly, and adjust levels as necessary. I have my headphones plugged into a MiniFuse device, so I will select that with channels 1 & 2.
Next, select an input device and channels that you know will be silent. We'll be sending JackTrip audio using the audio bridge, so we don't want anything else to get in the way. I'm going to use virtual channels provided by Blackhole, but you could use any available device or channels that you have, so long as they are not the same ones that you'll be using in Ableton.
Next, create the tracks that you want to use in Ableton. You may want to enable monitoring of the channels by clicking the "In" buttons. In this example, I have my microphone plugged into channel 1 on my Minifuse interface, and I'm also adding a MIDI channel with the "Organ Vibrato" instrument.
Next, drag and drop JackTrip's Audio Bridge plugin into your main channel. You can leave the settings at their defaults. This will send everything in your main mix to JackTrip, without impacting the signal in Ableton's main channel.
Since the plugin is set to "Pass-Through" all audio (by default), Ableton will also be sending it to your audio interface. As we discussed in the beginning, it can be confusing to have both apps sending audio to your interface. You can fix this by turning the main volume slider in Ableton down to zero.
An alternative would be to create a separate "Return" track in Ableton and putting JackTrip's Audio Bridge plugin on that. You could then use Ableton's send knobs to control the mix being sent to JackTrip. But if you do this you either need to:
- turn the main slider all the way down to avoid duplication of output
- ensure that your main track is sending audio to an (unused) interface or channels that are not your headphones
- make each of your audio tracks "Send only" (so they don't send audio to main)