SoundTouch

Our friends at Bose decided the stop supporting their SoundTouch Cloud, basically making a lot of speakers completely useless. I didn’t pay all that money just to have a stupid Bluetooth speaker.

Luckily, opensource saves the day! With this project you can restore functionality. https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch

In these notes we will go through the steps to get it working on your speaker.

Reference: https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/blob/main/docs/content/docs/guides/ON-DEVICE-INSTALL-WALKTHROUGH.md

Connecting to your speaker

First step is connect to your Bose speaker.

• Format an USB as FAT
• Mount it and create an empty remote_services file
• Insert it to your speaker and power cycle your speaker
• Figure out the IP address of your speaker. You can press the keys ‘5’ and ’-’ at the same time to get to a display menu that can show you your IP address.
• SSH to your speaker, no password is required.

# My speaker used settings that were older as a dinosaur, which prevented me from logging in. I've had to do the following stuff to be able to connect to it.
$ sudo update-crypto-policies --set LEGACY
$ sudo systemctl restart sshd
$ ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -oPubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa root@192.168.0.XX

Make sure to revert this LEGACY policy after you are done with the following command.

sudo update-crypto-policies --set DEFAULT 

Installing AfterTouch

Once connected via SSH to your device, do the following steps. Download the latest version of AfterTouch.

# Assuming you are logged in via SSH to your speaker
$ rw && curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/main/scripts/on-device-install/install.sh | sh

Verify that the endpoint is up.

$ wget -qO- http://localhost:8000/health
 
{"status":"up","timestamp":"2026-06-26T15:23:26+02:00","vcs_modified":"false","vcs_revision":"9331e63b2da54814a0cc8507d6e7c2072f199078","vcs_time":"2026-06-22T19:23:15Z","version":"v0.0.0-20260622192315-9331e63b2da5"}

Run sync and reboot.

$ sync
$ reboot

Wait for your speaker to reboot and connect again via SSH.

$ ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -oPubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa root@192.168.0.XX

Open a new terminal window and connect via SSH and port forwarding.

$ ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -L 8000:localhost:8000 root@192.168.0.XX

Navigate to http://localhost:8000/ in your browser.

In the AfterTouch UI: (I did not have to do this step as I did not have this warning.)

1. Open the Health tab.

2. Run or refresh the health checks.

3. Look for the warning:

   Speaker reports an empty <margeAccountUUID>

4. Click the QuickFix button (labelled “Fix”, “Pair account”, or “Apply QuickFix” depending on the version) and confirm.

I did have to go the the UI and figure out how to migrate the URLs from Bose to the AfterTouch that is now running on the speaker itself. I didn’t document that, sorry!

Then reboot again to let the pairing take effect:

$ sync
$ reboot

Connect to your speaker again.

$ ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -oPubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa root@192.168.0.XX

If you want to program preset buttons from the command line, download the CLI binary to the speaker’s /tmp (tmpfs, so it survives only until the next reboot — which is fine for a one-time setup run):

$ cd /tmp
 
$ curl -L --fail -o soundtouch-cli https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/releases/download/v0.111.3/soundtouch-cli-v0.111.3-linux-armv7
 
$ chmod +x soundtouch-cli
 
$ /tmp/soundtouch-cli --version
soundtouch-cli version v0.111.3

Replace v0.111.3 with the version you installed.

Each station must be playing before it can be saved. The sleep 5 gives the speaker time to buffer and confirm the stream before storing.

Press preset buttons briefly. A long press on the physical hardware overwrites the stored preset.

# Preset 1 — Q-Music
./soundtouch-cli --host 127.0.0.1 source custom-radio --url https://streams.radio.dpgmedia.cloud/redirect/qmusic_be/mp3 --name Q-Music --service-url "http://localhost:8000"
sleep 5
./soundtouch-cli --host 127.0.0.1 preset store-current --slot 1
 
# Preset 2 - MNM
./soundtouch-cli --host 127.0.0.1 source custom-radio --url http://icecast.vrtcdn.be/mnm-high.mp3  --name MNM --service-url "http://localhost:8000" 
sleep 5
./soundtouch-cli --host 127.0.0.1 preset store-current --slot 2

Okay, this was a shit show. It did not work at all and I always got the following error:

✗ Cannot select custom radio: Internet Radio service is not available
⚠️  💡 Available streaming services: Amazon Music, Deezer, Spotify
⚠️  To bypass this check, set SOUNDTOUCH_SKIP_AVAILABILITY_CHECK=true
2026/06/26 16:58:47 LOCAL_INTERNET_RADIO is not available

Trial and error and https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/issues/521 helped me solved. I basically did a factory reset (1 + ‘VOLUME DOWN’ button), connect the speaker back to Wifi and attempt to do the migration again in the UI and for some reason it suddenly worked.