Getting Started

Bose shut down the SoundTouch cloud on 6 May 2026, and your speakers lost the parts that depended on it: the preset buttons, music-service browsing, and stereo pairing on the SoundTouch 10. AfterTouch puts those back by running the missing service on a machine in your own home.

This page is the short route from “my presets do nothing” to “my presets work again”. Each step links to the guide that covers it in full; read those when something does not match your setup.

You need a machine that is always on (a Raspberry Pi, NAS, or home server), your speakers on the same network, and roughly half an hour for the first speaker.

Developers looking for the Go client library want Quick start: the Go client library instead.

Step 1: Run the service

soundtouch-service is the replacement for Bose’s cloud. Run it wherever you like, as long as your speakers can reach it: a Docker container on a home server, a binary on a Raspberry Pi, or, if you have no always-on machine, on one of the speakers themselves.

• Which deployment is right for me? compares the options in a paragraph each.
• Migration Guide, Step 1 has the exact commands for binaries, the install script, and Docker Compose.
• Raspberry Pi and On-Device Install are the two most common setups.

Whichever you pick, the service listens on port 8000. Open http://<your-server>:8000 and you should see the AfterTouch web UI. Use the address your speakers will use too, not localhost.

Step 2: Point your speaker at it

Your speaker still asks Bose’s servers for its presets. Migration rewrites the speaker’s configuration so it asks yours instead.

Open the web UI, go to Devices, find your speaker, and use Migrate. For most models this runs over the speaker’s own diagnostic port, so there is nothing to open up and no hardware to modify. Some models need SSH enabled from a USB drive first, which the guide walks through.

• Migration Guide is the full process, including what to do per model.
• Migration and Safety covers rolling back, and is worth reading before you start if you are nervous.
• Model Support Matrix says what is known to work where.

After the speaker reboots, it should appear in the web UI as paired.

Step 3: Check it worked

In the web UI, open your speaker. You should see what it is playing, volume and bass controls, its sources, and six preset tiles. Press play on something: the speaker responds within a second or two.

If the speaker does not appear, or a source is missing, start with Troubleshooting. The most common causes are the service being unreachable at the address the speaker was given, and a speaker that has not been rebooted since migration.

Step 4: Make the preset buttons work again

This is the part most people came for. In the web UI you can browse internet radio, search for a station, play it, and save it to one of the six slots with the star button. Those are the same six buttons on top of the speaker.

Get your preset buttons working again walks through it, including saving music from a NAS or USB drive, and the command-line equivalent if you would rather script your setup.

Where to go next

• Connecting Music Services for Spotify and the other services.
• Play from a NAS or USB drive for a local music library.
• Survival Guide for what the shutdown broke, what still works without AfterTouch, and what AfterTouch restores.
• CLI Reference if you prefer the command line.

Something not working, or a step that did not match what you saw? Please open an issue or ask in Discussions. Reports from setups we cannot test here are how this gets better.