am I doing something wrong?

[PMST]

well to cut a long story short, I got an m-audio fast track usb 8r and a yamaha spx 990... I used to use the yamaha in a studio enviroment, as a sound recording student, but everything there was set up and running so we just plugged stuff in the patchbay and route everything on an audient mixing desk and an analog radar recorder...
now it's all about figuring out how to route inserts in a digital enviroment and since I can't hear any reverb after half an hour of attempts I guess I must be either doing something wrong or dealing with some broken equipment...

so that's what I've been doing:

firstly I pluged the insert cable to Insert 1, then the red jack to the Left input of the yamaha and the balck jack to the Left output (I've also tried the other way round cause I can never remember which one is the tip/send and which one is the sleeve/return).
I opened Reaper and tried to figure out a way of hearing reverb onto a track via the insert... It should be possible I mean to send the signal of the recorded track to the spx and then get the track+reverb back to the fast track all via insert, then route it to a new track to hear or to arm and record.... right?
I just can't figure out how to do this.

Since I often get confused by digital routing stuff (yet reaper is one of the simplest enviroment I have known to date, but I'm new to it so I still need to figure that out completely), I decided that I should try and use the insert to hear some reverb on a mic directly on monitor.

So I picked up a mic, plugged it on input1 on the fast track, and hoped for my voice to come out of the monitor speakers with reverb. nope. I got some noise though - only with one red/balck configuration - if driving hard the monitor output... yet no change in the mic sound, no reverb. is the connection wrong (I really hope this)? the cable not working (which I doubt since it's new out of box)? the spx unit defective? I'm going to audition another fx box and see what happens...
see the weird thing about these insert points is that there is no knob on the fast track unit and no software control either to check whether you're receiving signal, so it's difficult to locate the problem.

thanks in advance.

 

[PMST]

update:
I thought that the shortest way to test whether the spx was working was to simply plug the mic into it and then to the m-audio.

had I not done this.

it did prove that it worked but there was much ground noise so I turned all the knobs down and plug everything off apart from the m-audio.
well surprisingly enough, the interface manager on the computer still got some signal from channel 1 even if there are no cables and the knob is to zero. also, the green light is steady on, which means it's continuously generating sound... well, ground noise. I can't figure out why this happened, and if it's just a coincidence that it occured after my spx test. but for whatever reason, I'm quite panicking about it. this m-audio is new and I'm already having problems.

surely a coincidence is that half of my minijack to jack adaptor for my headphones got stuck in the plug while the other half was torn apart... I had to use pliers to got it out.

I think today I'm not doing anything else!

 

[Roguetitan]

you do have an asio driver right? if not you can download one from ASIO for all
you will need to click options then click preferences, make sure everything is set properly.
click track and select a new track
if you can record more than one track you will need to open your routing matrix to make sure the track is routed properly.
you will then need to open I/O on the track to make sure the components are selected.
click the speaker Icon on the track to engage the monitoring.

Hope this helps

EDIT: there is also a Reaper support forum where you can get a lot of your questions answered more than likely someone there has encountered the same problems you have and can steer you in the right direction.