I have a slightly different approcah: I have one computer that drives the audio in (currently) six zones (with four PCI soundcards, the built in on my MSI KT4 Ultra and one USB sound card, which probably will have company of a few more pretty soon). So audio is currently available in the dedicated home theater in the basement, the living room, the two bathrooms, our bedroom and my seven year old son Kevin's room (he got an amp, a speaker set and his own remote for the IRMan receiver in the HTPC/Media server for his birthday a few weeks ago). One relief is that most of the rooms (with the exception for the living room and the HT) have regular "Joe Sixpack" sound systems, so I don't need very high quality sound cards for those. As for the living room and HT they have nice speakers and good Onkyo and Denon receivers with digital in, so I just feed them the digital output from two pretty good sound cards (one Hercules card and a Creative Audigy 2), and that gives me more than good enough sound quality. As I like to say: "I'm neither audiophile or videophile, I just like good music and good (or sometimes bad) movies."
This media server is placed in a room in the cellar next to the HT, and it also works as a HTPC, with a high quality video cable feeding the Barco Graphics 808 CRT proj, and optical digital out feeding Dolby Digital sound to the Onkyo 939 receiver (their former flagship). I'm quite lucky since I can run cables from that room and straight up to the attic, where they fan out and come down in the necessary rooms. I have the S-video output from the ATI Radeon card routed to the living room, where it goes into a VCR, so if I want to watch DiVX in any of the five rooms with TV I take that from the antenna cable. So I can surf the Net and do PC work from any room that has an IR receiver (which is in all rooms with a TV) and my wife even let's me use the TV in the living room for that at times. High quality video of course stays in the HT. Adding cables for a new zone takes me about half an hour.
Finally I have a notebook connected to the same WLan that the pocketPC uses, so I can write this in the "throne room".
As for the software I use (of course) MC9 for audio and ZoomPlayer for DVD's and the video files I watch in the HT (partly because I want to use filters from different companies for video and audio, and partly because I like the zooming and moving of the image that Zoom gives me, and besides I don't know how MC will react to playing mp3s on a couple of zones and DVD in the HT at the same time). I'm running XP Pro SP1, the only special thing about it is the multitude of sound card drives (I actually installed them all without any larger problems, mainly because I use PowerQuest's Drive Image before every change in the system) and an old SCSI card that has an exyternal cable to the cabinet where I have my HT DVD Rom (in the HT, of course...). Girder takes care of controling the audio and ZoomPlayer from all those IR remotes (I forgot to mention that I have an IR receiver that converts the IR to RF in every zone and a box that converts it back to IR and blasts it into the IRMan in the computer room), and I use my favourite control method: Ben's NetRemote with my PocketLoox.
On yesterday's count I had about 19 100 MP3 files (mostly my own ripped CD collection in HQ Lame VBR, I'm a retired DJ and have a huge pile) and 150 DiVX (mostly my own DVD's ripped so my two kids can watch Disney and other children's movies on their own computers in their rooms without hogging the TV).
And how does this work? Well, I can watch a DVD with a rock solid image in the HT while all the other zones are playing different MP3 files at the same time. I haven't dared to look at the CPU load while doing that, but I have a huge CPU fan and case fans in the PC, since it's in a separate room I don't care how much noise it makes.
When I need to play the same music in all zones I use SPDIF out from the Audigy and sendts it into the SPDIF in on the other cards.
The MC9/Zoom approach fits me very good, and I think that the one computer method is the best way, since it's totally transparent, and I do not have to spread any more computers around than I already have. I can teach anybody to use my system in five minutes. Case in point: It took my son about 40 seconds to understand it. My mother would be the real challenge, though...
the two things I'd like to see in MC is:
1. A better ripping method. On worn cd's I have to use Exact Audio Copy, with it's advanced error checking methods. But my guess is that it would be pretty difficult to implement.
2. A better way of adressing/changing zones than the current, that demands use of Pebbles (for PocketPC) or a computer with RemoteAdministrator. But I know this is coming, I'm just the impatient type...
Oh yes, thank you, guys! MC9 made Christmas very easy for me, I just ordered it to play all the Christmas music on my computer, shuffeled, which lasted about five hours.
All in all I'm really starting to enjoy the benefits of my system, since MC9 made sure that I can start to remove the "bunch of WinAmps". The only WinAmp still in use is for my son's room since I don't want him to learn how to control the HTPC from his PC. This will be buried with great seremony the day I can adress zones directly on MC9.