Pause/Play buttons that affect nested movies?

programming flash
1

I’m creating an interactive demo that (surprise surprise) I’m learning to code on the fly. Currently, I have a interface.swf, with each of the five sections as separate .swfs that are loaded into the main interface. Each section has narration and animation.

I’m looking to create universal pause/play buttons that not only stop/play each of the child movie clips in the sections, but the sound as well. I attempted modifying a function I found that has an if…in statement to call the nested child clips in each of them, but it doesn’t seem to want to work… Here’s what the two functions look like, as they stand:

function stopTimeline() {
        this.stop();
        for (var i in this) {
                if (typeof this*=="movieclip") {
                        if (this*._parent==this) {
                                this*.stopTimeline();
                        }
                }
        }
}

function playTimeline() {
        this.play();
        for (var i in this) {
                if (typeof this*=="movieclip") {
                        if (this*._parent==this) {
                                this*.playTimeline();
                        }
                }
        }
}

this.pau_btn.onRelease = function() {
    stopAllSounds();
    stopTimeline();
}

this.play_btn.onRelease = function() {
    playTimeline();

As you can see, I haven’t even gotten around to the sound part yet, because I’m having a hard time figuring out how to code that into the button as well.

Any help would be enormously appreciated…