Whole Home Audio Programming

[buckeye]

Newbie question on setup/best practices:

I have an 8 Zone Amp plus 2 AV receivers to provide audio to 10 different rooms/zones in the house. Two of the inputs into the Amp are two seperate Sonos Amps (in case we want to listen to different music in different zones). We primarily listen to music through Sonos. In addition we have the new lighting keypads in all of the rooms where there is an audio zone. I'm looking for a way to program the system so that if music isn't already on in any of the rooms I can press a button on the keypad in that room and it starts a custom Sonos playlist. I already have this programmed for one of the zones (kitchen) so that when the keypad is pressed it sets the audio to Sonos and starts our most used playlist in shuffle mode. This works great for that room and we end up just managing a big playlist with hundreds of songs either from our itunes library or Rhapsody that we add/delete from occasionally so that when the button is pressed it plays them in shuffle mode.

I'm looking for advice on the best way to configure the system so that in each of the audio zones if the "Music" button is pressed it will first check to see if Sonos is already playing in any other zone (and ideally not paused) and if so just add that room to that Sonos source. If no other zones are already playing Sonos it will do the same thing I have programmed in the kitchen and set the audio to Sonos for the playlist in shuffle mode. In a nutshell, I want to be able to start listening to music in any room and add rooms to that music source through buttons on the keypad.

I'm guessing I could accomplish this by setting up variables and tracking the sources and status of those sources for each of the zones but before I go about that I wanted to see if anyone else has already setup something similar and has found a really good solution for accomplishing this sort of thing. Any other whole home tips would be welcome too--for example I was considering using a double tap to skip the current song or triple tap to pause the playlist.

Thanks for any input!

[Cyknight]

If you want to use double and triple make sure you program on single tap not press or it would execute both.

As for the other thing - If the driver allows power state tracking (if it does it'll show the power state variable under programming if you press the + sign next to it) this is fairly easy.

On button press

IF Sonos 1 is on

--Select Sonos 1 as the source in room

--stop

IF Sonos 2 is on

--Select Sonos 2 as the source in room

--stop

Select playlist...whatever you already have..