WOW!! Zones are VERY cool. I took a detour from my main objective to mess with them for a bit. Very useful and intuitive. I had not noticed prior, but my Test PC was a Zone on my "Audio Server" PC and vice versa. Without any noticeable effort to configure things, I was able to be at one PC, but feel like I was at the other. This works really well.
When I got back to trying to solve my main intent, I was able to set up one MS Shortcut as "MC17.exe /MCC 10011,0" (where 0 = Zone 1), with that Zone set to have the Output Mode Setting = PC Speakers in Options (Audio), and I also set up another MS Shortcut as "MC17.exe /MCC 10011,3" (where 3 = Zone 4), with that Zone set to have the Output Mode Setting = S/PDIF Optical output in Options. Clicking on one Shortcut vs the other on my Desktop accomplished the switching between Zones and when in the relevant Zone, the output selected in the Options was applied correctly. So far so good.
But then I hit a snag - Despite having the Startup Action in Options selected (to start playing current playlist), nothing starts playing. Before jumping to the "How hard is it to push..." defense, lets envision my MC user community as being people that are not overly technically inclined (sometimes kids and family, other times drunk guests). Things need to be either fully executed with a single button or a right click with obvious options, which explains why I try to accomplish as much as humanly possible with the click of a single button.
In an effort to overcome no music automatically playing after setting the relevant Zone (same room, but different speaker output in my case), I tried a few things, but nothing has worked yet...
Please consider the following scenarios and efforts as well as the related questions.
1) On my test PC when I start MC, it starts playing automatically. But on my Audio Server PC, that is seemingly optioned the same way, it does not. Are there any other options that I should be taking into consideration?
2) Once in the desired zone using /MCC 10011,#, if I execute another /MCC command (like 10047), then music starts playing in that zone (and each zone can play different music - Wow, impressive... I did not expect that to be so easy), but again my need is to set the zone and start the music with a single button push. Is there a way to issue multiple MCC commands in a MS Shortcut - I tried "MC17.exe /MCC 10011,0 /MCC 10047" and a few other iterations but they did not work.
3) Am I correct in my assumption that the Options in each zone should apply to that zone and be mutually exclusive from the other zones? If so, is there a known bug (or confusion on my part) that might explain why the Startup option is not working?
Thank you in advance for any assistance on these.