Yes it’s involved.
Alsa handles the physical ports and provides a virtual framework with software audio handling and a good deal else as well. Jack handles the movement of data between the ports and provides a low latency environment that is designed for ‘professional’ (whatever that means) but they are different beasts. There are programmes for moving between the two different worlds like a2jmidi and a2j.
By in large USB does seem to just work, but you will need to turn off all the jack components to get the alsa stuff to play a sound file.You need to be able to see the device you are using in the jack world, I don’t know how this works for your specific USB device, but if we can get it playing files under Alsa we ‘should’ be able to get it to do something useful.