Audio output / Workstation VS. Scheduler PC

[bkacian]

This is my 2nd year using XLights, first year was only lights.

Well now I have a landscape audio system that covers the front yard where the show is. I want to have audio playing this year. I read the manual, watched many how-to videos and since I cannot find concrete evidence of audio hardware, (1) is it out there and I'm missing it? or (2) do I just use the 'audio out' from the PC?

Also I don't want to tie up my workstation PC that I do my daily work on, programming, emails, etc.. So If I setup a 2nd pc only to run the XLights scheduler and map it to my XLights files stored on a cloud, (3) would the XLights scheduler PC be an OK audio source output?

Thanks for reading the NEWB questions.

[maldridge]

You can just use whatever sound card the computer has and pipe that to your desired audio sink.  Depending on your landscape audio vendor it may need some adapters in the middle, though is less common with newer systems.

A word of caution depending on how you're doing this "cloud mapped files" is that xLights doesn't hot-reload all its files, so you may need to close and re-open it to get it to recognize all updates after you've pushed new files.

[bkacian]

Great.. Seems like I'm on the right track.

Thanks for the prompt reply, maldridge.