Configure Voicemeeter
The first thing you want to do is to click on "A1" in the upper right conner and select the ASIO driver of your hardware audio card. I will use my Roland OCTA-CAPTURE as you can see. Leave the "A2" and "A3" as is or remove the entries. We don't need them.
Next thing is that you want to have the virtual inputs configured. For the "Voicemeeter VAIO" select "B2" and for the "Voicemeeter AUX" select "A1".
In the current scenario I've selected all routings for the hardware input strips to "B1" in order to use my analog inputs of the hardware sound card. This setting matches the I/O setting that we will do in Ableton Live. The master sections are all in "Normal mode".
Now click on Menu -> System Settings/Options to check and tweak your sample rate and buffer size:
In this dialog you can check if all of your devices are using the same sample rate. I changed the buffer size and sample rate of the ASIO settings from default to the values of my hardware sound card and also changed the preferred sample rate to 48kHz (what I suggested in step 0). So we are tweaking our settings to match that:
We now have Voicemeeter Banana set up to route the signal that comes from your DAW directly to "B2" so we are not able to hear our DAW at the moment. So yes, this is working as expected. And no, we don't hear a f**** thing yet.
The only signal that is currently going to your hardware audio device is the AUX channel. And you might already guess: that will come in the next step when we configure our jam client.