How to route PT to the external headphones on a MacBook?

[Blues Bird]

I have a 2021 MacBook Pro M1Pro which I want to use a mobile sketchbook for musical ideas and a little pre production before taking it to the studio.

So I hooked up my Strat via Apogee Jam+ to Pro Tools Intro. Monitoring through the Macbook speakers. Thought everything worked fine for the intended purposes until I tried to connect external headphones to the dedicated jack on the MacBook. No sound.

Apparently the MacBook does not supply automatically the headphone jack witch the signal for the internal speakers. So I tried to to integrate the external headphones via Pro Tools aggregate. But no success. I can choose the "external headphones" as output but no sound.

Is it really that hard to listen to Pro Tools main out (or any other channel) on a MacBook? Please help.

[Darryl Ramm]

If only there was a way to search for things here before posting.

https://www.google.com/search?q=macb...3Aduc.avid.com

[K Roche]

I have the exact same 2021 MB Pro M1 Pro chip machine



And no you do not to try to set up the Headphones as an aggregate device in PT

Instead plug in the headphones Then in PT go to Setup and the "Playback Engine" and select the "External Headphones" as the playback engine (they should be showing as a selection in the Playback engine dropdown) if not --go to the Mac >System Setting> Sound and see if they are selected as the Output and also maybe the Mac Audio Midi window and select the HP's for Output
If those are selected on the Mac sound and audio midi,, then the External Headphones should should show up in Pro Tools > Setup > Playback engine dropdown menu

[Darryl Ramm]

Hang on, you have a JAM+ why are you not connecting your headphone to it's headphone output?

And if you don't want to use that JAM+ headphone output while recoding with the JAM+ then yes you do need to aggregate the JAM+ and whatever other audio output you want to use, e.g. the Mac Speaker or Headphones. Pro Tools needs the aggregate device, it does not work with separate input and output devices. But you then live with the flakiness of aggregations. If you are trying to track reliably, at small H/W Buffer you are almost certainly better off not using aggregation and using the built in headphone output in the JAM+.

And that headphone switching behavior in MacBook Pros etc. has been that way for many years now and is a total PITA in how it interacts with Pro Tools. And the available workarounds to deal with that switching are discussed in the first thread in those search results I linked to.

[K Roche]

Opps:: Darryl is correct---- I forgot about the JAM. being involved in the situation.
I was just testing my MBP with no other input device, noting that unlike say streaming Youtube, that with Pro Tools the MBP did not automatically switch when the HP jack was inserted ..

[its2loud]

On a side note,

Regarding MacBook Pros or any Mac with a headphone output. You can setup dual outputs using Aux IO. If you don’t have headphones plugged in, the Aux IO just won’t be available but you don’t need to switch playback engines or setup an Aggregate device.

In the OP’s case, monitoring through JAM is the way to go, as Darryl pointed out, but for Niobe else using built in MacBook speakers as your playback engine. This is an alternative method to using headphones and MacBook speakers.