Being able to control what you listen to where you listen to it is best accomplished with a centralized system using an audio matrix. That is because distributed systems make it difficult (if not impossible) to play the same song through out the entire house (imagine throwing a party). Centralized systems also make muting the music and playing a chime when the doorbell or phone rings simple. Whole house paging through the speakers via the phone system is also much easier with a centralized system. It is perfectly legal to copy ("rip") CD's that you have purchased to a centralized file server. We are strong believers in choosing a "lossless" compression algorithm for storing your digital music. The logic being that disk space is cheap, and your ears can here the difference when played back through a high end system. Once your system is installed you can use the same Windows based program you use to control your lighting (free download from here) to control your audio matrix.
We use these free (open source) web based interfaces to control our music collection:
Simple interface for playing music throughout the house.
Advanced interface for browsing, selecting, downloading, or streaming digital content. Complete with cover art and lyrics.