[tyson]

So I'm in the process of building a new house and am looking at installing an 16 channel amplifier with at least 6-8 zones. The 16 channel amplifier is purely an amplifier that takes RCA with no volume control. I'm thinking of building an XBMC server on Windows 2008/2012 Server or Ubuntu (haven't decided yet) and using 6+ Apple TV's (with the AIR UPNP Scanner software) to stream the music from the XBMC server to the distributed audio amplifier. I've done some research on this and it seems possible, but but not entirely sure if I can do all this via an IPAD tablet.

With this setup can I control each streaming zone (i.e. navigate music, play and control volumes for each zone) separately on an IPAD tablet with the XBMX server? Are there any limitations that anyone knows about? What IPAD apps are available?

Thank you for any help!!!!

[nokdim]

If I understand you correctly you dont need an XBMC Server at all you need a NAS that all your Apple TV's can stream from.

From the iPad you can get the official XBMC remote which will connect to your Apple TV's running XBMC and you can control each of those and what they are playing which will change what is playing in a specific Zone.

[tyson]

Thanks nokdim,

For some reason I thought XBMC was a server based application that streamed music to the airplay devices. So the XBMC remote communicates directly to the airplay devices, sweet!!! So multiple zones are fully supported. Does the NAS file server need to use Microsoft SMB file sharing or do you need itunes running for airplay support?

[nokdim]

So the remote can control XBMC Airplay devices so you would need to jailbreak your ATV's and install XBMC on them to control them.

You can use SMB or NFS or even UPNP.