Audio on first slide plays again after branching and return

Hello friends,

I have a course that includes many branched activities with audios.  The original format included a root slide and 2 buttons that lead off to 2 separate branches, which when completed return the learner to the original base slide.  There is an audio on the first root slide which is set to play at the start of the slide. I used the conditional trigger "play audio if audio is false" and then once completed the audio is set to true. 

The state of the buttons that allowed the learner to jump to the next branched activities were originally set to "disabled" until the audio completed. But based on feedback from learners, I changed the button trigger to change the state to active after the timeline reaches X seconds. With that change, the audio on the root slide, then, might never complete and when the learner is returned to that root slide, the audio is, therefore, not false and plays again.  I can make all of the buttons active on that slide at the same time so the learner can jump to the next branch even though audio starts play again, but it is a little awkward.  How can I do this differently?

Thanks for your help!