Hi all,
I have been a user of JRiver for a couple of months and love it. I am using JRiver as my whole house audio system with a separate zone for each room. I am trying to figure out how I could use JRiver for public announcements. I have searched the forum & found that Jmone has been nagging for a long time to get intercom functionality built into JRiver. This would obviously be fabulous if done. However for now what I would like to be able to do at a minimum is, if I want to make an announcement to all or selected zones, the system should pause the various music streams playing in various zones, make the announcement, and then all the zones should continue where they left off.
Is there a built-in easy way of doing this? If not, how can I accomplish the “Pause - Play announcement - Go back to previous position” thing?
I tinkered around and came up with the idea to make an additional separate “PA” zone for each actual zone, and use the same audio output as the original zone. So for example for the kitchen I would make an additional zone called “PA Kitchen” & use the same audio output as the “Kitchen” zone. Then using the MCWS interface I could send a REST command to pause all “original” zones & play the announcement on the “PA” zones, then send a REST command to all original zones to start playing again. The problem is that with the recommended setting on the original zone of taking the exclusive rights to the audio output, JRiver cannot play to the same output even when paused. The only way it would work is if I stop the music vs. pause in the original zones. But then the question is, after the announcement, how can I get the original zones to start playing again at the positions they were at. Also only those zones that were playing before should start playing again and not those zones that were off.
Thank you very much in advance.