I'm trying to plan a basic whole house audio system around the apple tv and I was hoping that you all might be able to help me avoid pitfalls and let me know if what I have laid out will work.

My family is familiar with iTunes and they use it to purchase music and movies to watch on their computers. My wife and daughter have their own laptops (windows) and ipods with their own music. I'm fairly computer literate but the girls are not. I want to do something that's as easy as possible for them to use.

What I'm thinking is to have at least 3 apple tv's, each synced with a different library (two for the girls and one for my library). This way their computers won't have to be on to have access to their libraries on the TV. Each of the aTV's would then be setup to stream from each other. The aTV's would be in each of the girl's rooms and one in the living room. I would put an airport express to feed to outdoor speakers and control it with an iPod Touch (with a waterproof case for pool use).

Will that work to allow them to purchase music and video anywhere and hear and watch them anywhere? I have a library that's mostly apple lossless, will I see a consolidated library on the aTV's or will I have to manually select which library I want to listen to? Does the volume control on the aTV really work or will I likely have to control the volume with the receiver?

Thanks in advance for any help or insight that you could provide.

Your setup is more complicated than mine. I have one central Library on a MacBook syncing to two AppleTv's and one AirPort Express by the pool. From the Remote application on my iPhone, I can control the library on the MacBook or any of the ATV's (all the same library in my case but not necessarily in yours) and also control which speakers to play on. For example, I can grab the library on the Family Room ATV and have it play out of the Family room ATV, the Living Room ATV and/or outside by the pool -- or any combination thereof. In your case, you will have three libraries on three different ATV's always on. You should be able to access any three of those libraries and play them to any of your locations. For example from the Remote application you could play the Living Room ATV library on the Family Room ATV or vise versa. I can also control the volume from the iPhone, but it is a little buggy. Sometimes I touch the slider on my iPhone and it will not respond. Also, later after you are done outside or whatever, the changes you made to speakers or volume remain in effect. So, later when you try to watch a movie on one of your ATV's, you can't figure out why there is no audio -- then you remember you turned off that speaker or turned the volume down. Then you need to find your iPhone, start the Remote application and restore the settings for that ATV.