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.

My margeAccount was actually empty, but I did not see any ‘QuickFix’. Instead I had to click on the button shown (Complete pairing) in the following entry. It was on the Health tab.

### Speaker reports an empty <margeAccountUUID>
Complete pairing

Add your hostname to your /etc/hosts file. The migration does not let you point to localhost.

root@spotty:~# cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1	localhost.localdomain		localhost
127.0.0.1    spotty

Navigate to the ‘4.Migration’ tab and change all the URLs so they point to ‘https://spotty:8080/xxx’.

Click on ‘Apply Suggested Plan’ at the bottom. Your speaker will now migrate.

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.

The important thing was that I needed to do the migration first, then do a factory reset and then fix the empty margeAccount by clicking on the ‘pair’ button in the Health tab.