PC controlled x-fader?

["Julian Stuhler" <julian.stuhler@xxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone.

This may seem to be an off-the-wall requirement (even for this group!)
but bear with me..

Does anyone know of a solution that will allow me to cross-fade between
two audio sources under PC (or IR) control?

I'm just beginning to experiment with speech enabling my HA server so
that it can announce important events etc. Currently I feed the PC sound
card output via my main AV amp and through to the house audio system.
The problem with this is if I want the HA server to announce something,
it has to interrupt whatever is playing on the house audio system by
switching the amp input. Even worse, after the announcement is complete
I have to know what input the amp was using so I can switch it back to
whatever was playing.

A much neater solution would be to feed both the amp output and the PC
sound card output into some sort of cross fader. This would normally be
set with the PC input at 0% and the amp input at 100%, but when the HA
server needs to announce something it could alter this to (say) 50% on
each input. This would allow the announcement to be made on top of the
existing sound, which seems a much neater way of doing things.

Or am I just trying to over-engineer things while overlooking a much
more obvious solution?

Thanks!

Julian




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