[Darryl Ramm]

YouTube is a good place to look for tutorials, which sounds like you might be doing. But then what you post here and provide a utterly muddled description of nothing how do you expecting somebody to be able to help? What exact video/instructions are you following and at what point does that not work? What exactly happens on your computer screen? What exact errors do you get? You will not make good progress if your head is as muddled as it seems here. Start at the basics and get one thing working at a time....

Getting an audio interface to work has nothing to do with getting a VI to work. So it's an utter waste of time farting around with VIs until you get audio working. As a test should be able to open an empty session, drag and drop some existing audio say from a commercial mp3 onto that session, which will create the audio tracks for you and then you can play and hear the audio tracks. Life is too short, stop wasting time and buy an interface, might be as simple/cheap as a Focusrite 2i2, the canonical beginner interface.

And given all the muddling here I'm going to guess you have not optimized the computer or aware of that, start at "help us help you" up top of every DUC web page and do that now to help avoid future problems.

Once you have audio working the start with the simplest VI... get the Pro Tools mini grand VI working. You have to install the separate VI installer for Pro Tools.

Installing third party plugins in Pro Tools should not be hard, check you have compatible versions and just run the installer. Leave all install options to their default if you can.

Pro Tools First is an awful DAW to get started with, it's an awful DAW in general being so crippled, starting with you can't add third party plugins/VIs so unless you are willing to subscribe to or purchase Pro Tools standard I would not waste my time, especially if you want to work with third party VIs.

Otherwise find another DAW, lots of other options out there, if you are cost sensitive, many other ones are lower cost than Pro Tools like Reaper or FL Studio. Lots of choices but best one is usually the one that collaborators, friends and bandmates use and can help you with.