Get your preset buttons working again

The six buttons on top of your speaker are the first thing the Bose shutdown took away: pressing one used to ask Bose’s servers what to play. With AfterTouch running and your speaker migrated, they work again, and you decide what goes in each slot.

This guide uses the web UI, which is the shortest path. The command line does the same things and is covered further down, for anyone who would rather script their setup.

Before you start, you need a migrated speaker that appears in the web UI. If that is not the case yet, see Getting Started.

Save a radio station

1. Open the web UI at http://<your-server>:8000 and pick your speaker.
2. Find something to play. The TuneIn page browses stations by category, and the RadioBrowser page searches a community directory of internet stations. Both let you play a result straight to a speaker, so there is no need to hunt for stream URLs by hand.
3. Press play and let the station start.
4. Press the ★ at the top right of the now-playing card, then pick a slot from 1 2 3 4 5 6.

The star turns gold once the current content is saved in a slot, and its tooltip names which one. An empty preset tile reads Save current here and saves to that slot when you click it, which is quicker when you already know where you want it.

Press the matching button on the speaker. It should start playing within a few seconds.

Save music from a NAS or USB drive

Music from a DLNA server works the same way, and does not need to be playing first.

1. Open the Library page and pick your media server. If none is listed, set one up first: see Play from a NAS or USB drive.
2. Browse to an album, a folder, or a single track.
3. Press the ★ on that row and pick a slot.

Nothing is interrupted: the item is saved by name, so whatever is playing keeps playing. A saved folder plays from its first track when you recall it, and skip forward and back move through it.

Save what is already playing

Anything the speaker can play and mark as presetable can go in a slot, whatever its source: a Spotify album, a TuneIn station, a track from your library. Play it, press the ★, pick a slot.

Live inputs cannot be saved, because there is nothing to recall: Bluetooth, AUX and AirPlay have no address to store. The star is greyed out for those.

What a preset remembers

A preset stores what to play, not the audio: a source, a location within that source, and a name. Two consequences worth knowing:

• Artwork comes from the source. Library items get their cover from your media server, so a preset tile can be blank if that server is unreachable from your browser. Presets saved before v0.131.0 keep their blank artwork until you save them again; there is no way to fill them in retroactively.
• A preset can go stale. If a media server reindexes, or a station disappears from a directory, the stored location may no longer resolve. Save it again to fix it.

From the command line

soundtouch-cli talks to the speaker directly, and is the right tool for repeatable setups. Point --host at the speaker, not at the service.

See what is in the slots

soundtouch-cli --host 192.0.2.100 preset list

Save what is playing

soundtouch-cli --host 192.0.2.100 preset store-current --slot 1

Save specific content

# A TuneIn station
soundtouch-cli --host 192.0.2.100 preset store \
  --slot 3 \
  --source TUNEIN \
  --location "/v1/playback/station/s33828" \
  --name "Example Radio"

# A Spotify album
soundtouch-cli --host 192.0.2.100 preset store \
  --slot 2 \
  --source SPOTIFY \
  --location "spotify:album:4aawyAB9vmqN3uQ7FjRGTy" \
  --name "An Album"

Save a direct stream URL

A raw .mp3 or .aac stream needs one extra flag. The speaker’s radio module fetches the preset’s location and expects a station description in return, not audio, so AfterTouch has to serve that description. --service-url tells the CLI where your service lives, and the stream URL is wrapped for you:

soundtouch-cli --host 192.0.2.100 preset store \
  --slot 4 \
  --source LOCAL_INTERNET_RADIO \
  --location "https://stream.example.com/jazz" \
  --name "Jazz Stream" \
  --service-url https://soundtouch.local

Without --service-url the preset is stored but the speaker cannot play it.

Recall and remove

soundtouch-cli --host 192.0.2.100 preset select --slot 1
soundtouch-cli --host 192.0.2.100 preset remove --slot 6

When a preset does not work

The star is greyed out. The current source cannot be saved. Bluetooth, AUX and AirPlay never can; switch to a station or a library item first.

The button does nothing on the speaker. Check the slot actually holds something (preset list, or look at the tiles). If it does, the stored location may have gone stale, so save it again. For a LOCAL_INTERNET_RADIO preset stored from the command line, check it was stored with --service-url.

A slot emptied itself. One cause was found and fixed in v0.132.0 (presets were addressed by list position rather than by button number, so one could overwrite another), and a second candidate fix shipped in the same release for library presets whose account is a server name. If you are on an older version, upgrade and save the preset again. If it still happens, please open an issue: that is worth knowing about.

Nothing happens at all. Work through Troubleshooting first; a speaker that is not reaching your service cannot recall anything.

Going further

• Preset Management is the reference: the ContentItem shape, what the speaker stores, and where it is fragile.
• CLI Reference documents every preset flag.
• WebSocket Events covers reacting to preset changes in your own code.
• Preset management example is the Go version.