I recently set up shairport-sync[0] on a pair of Raspberry Pi's w/ USB DACs and nice speakers to get multi-room audio from Apple music. It's pretty nice!
It definitely was a bit of a process to set up, but well documented and much less painful than what this sounds like.
I also put headless plexamp on one, which lets me play my music from Plex, although I haven't gotten around to putting it on the other one yet for multi-room audio.