Releasing the microphone?

Hi everybody. I have been a user of Rhasspy quite some time now and I figured most problems out by myself and existing posts in this forum. However, now I have a short question:

Is it possible to release the microphone temporarily (similar to turning on/off the hotword via http api)? The reason for my questions is that I want to run shairport-sync along on the same device for listening to music. This program requires a output sampling rate of 44.1 kHz or higher but when my ReSpeaker 2-Mics HAT is set to 16 kHz on the microphone it is not able to set a different sampling rate for simultaneous sound output. Thus, I figured that releasing the microphone would be the simplest approach since I am not able to wake up my “Jarvis” while listening to music anyways.