With the discovery of Ed’s TrainCrew audio app., the next step was to see if I could overlay those sounds seamlessly on top of the locomotive audio being fed from the under layout sound decoder to my wireless headphones. Anticipating this need, awhile back I picked up an audio “mixer” from Pricom. One side of the board has four ports to accept incoming sounds, on the other side is an output plug for the headphones. I loaded the TrainCrew app. on my iPhone and plugged the phone into one port. I ran a cable from the under table layout decoder plug to another port. I turned on the throttle and the locomotive sound audio was feeding through the mixer without issue. So far, so good. Next, I hit the brake wheel function on TrainCrew. A perfect sound overlay! It works!
All is not resolved, however. The way I’ve set this up, you are essentially tethered to one location due to the plug connecting the phone to the mixer. If you want to “trigger” the sounds on the phone you need to walk over to the phone which is plugged into the mixer. No problem on a small switching layout like the LAJ or East Rail. On larger layouts like the Downtown Spur you need to walk back to the phone everything you want to trigger a sound. There are a number of work arounds for this I’m sure. Progress is being made.
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Update: After posting the above blog. Jeremy F. was kind enough to come up with a solution for un-tethering the iphone via bluetooth. He writes:
“The solution to untethering your iPhone is a simple little Bluetooth receiver like this:
http://m.gearbest.com/musical-instruments/pp_211703.html
Should give you about 40 feet of range in an open space. I use one in my car for music and podcasts, and it sounds great.”
Thanks Jeremy!