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.

Change a slot without playing anything

The ✎ next to each preset tile opens the slot editor. It lists what AfterTouch has seen this household play or store, so filling a slot is picking from that list rather than finding the station again first.

From the editor you can:

• Fill the slot from the list. Type in the filter box to narrow it.
• Rename what is in the slot. The name is yours; it does not have to match what the station calls itself.
• Move it to another slot. Press a slot number under “Move to”. A slot that already holds something is marked, says what it would replace, and needs a second press.
• Empty the slot. The station stays on the list, so this loses the slot’s contents, not the station.

Nothing here needs the speaker to be playing, and none of it involves editing files. If you have been recovering presets by hand from Presets.xml or over SSH, this replaces that.

Content another speaker has

The list is shared across your speakers, so it also offers things only one of them can play: an album on a media server this speaker has not discovered, or a service linked on another one. Those entries are dimmed and say why, for example “not on this speaker’s Library accounts”.

You can still pick one. The marking is based on the source list the player last read, which can be a few minutes old, so AfterTouch checks again against the speaker before writing and refuses with what is missing, naming the sources the speaker does have. To use such an entry here, add that media server or link that service on this speaker first, then pick it again.

The list, and what is on it

The list is a catalog of what AfterTouch has seen: every preset it has stored and everything that has played, across all your speakers, whichever one it happened on. That is what makes it useful for two jobs at once.

• Getting something back. A slot that gets emptied, by you or by anything else, leaves its station on the list. Putting it back is picking it again.
• Copying between speakers. Open the editor on the second speaker and pick the same entry.

An entry already sitting in a slot is still listed, and says which slot it is in. Putting the same station in two slots is allowed; it is sometimes what you want.

The list holds the 100 most recently seen entries, which costs about 45 KB. Change that in the admin UI under Settings (“Preset catalog size”), or by setting catalog_size in settings.json:

{ "catalog_size": 250 }

When the list is full, stations that merely played are dropped before ones that were saved as a preset, so what you are most likely to want back stays longest.

Setting it to 0 turns the catalog off and discards what is stored, which is worth knowing if you run AfterTouch on the speaker itself and want to keep the flash volume as quiet as possible. An empty box (or leaving the setting out of settings.json) keeps the default of 100, and follows it if the default changes later.

When AfterTouch and the speaker disagree

Above the preset tiles, a warning appears if what AfterTouch has stored for a speaker does not match what the speaker reports, for example “AfterTouch stores 8 presets for this speaker, 2 of which it can never play”. On a healthy setup there is nothing there.

Open it and you see the stored rows as stored, each saying why it cannot be played: no such button on this speaker, no button number at all, or nothing to play. Remove them one at a time, or use the button that removes all the rows the speaker cannot play.

This matters beyond tidiness. A stored list with more rows than the speaker has buttons is why:

• “Sync Data” is refused as destructive. Importing the speaker’s six presets would shrink the stored eight, and a shrinking import is refused unless you confirm it.
• A preset you just saved comes back as the old one. AfterTouch serves its stored list to the speaker, so the extra rows keep winning.

Where a button holds different things on the two sides, it is listed with both, and you pick one:

• Keep ours puts what AfterTouch stores onto the speaker, so the speaker catches up now instead of at its next fetch.
• Take the speaker’s stores what the speaker has, so AfterTouch stops handing back the old entry.

Either way the other one stays in the list you fill slots from, so a choice can be undone. This is the piece “Sync Data” cannot do: that imports a speaker’s whole list at once, and refuses outright when it would shrink what is stored.

Remove deletes the row from what AfterTouch stores. It presses nothing on the speaker, and it does not lose the station: that stays in the list you pick from, so you can put it straight back into a slot.

This is the one edit that goes to AfterTouch rather than to the speaker. The rows exist only in AfterTouch, and some of them name no button the speaker could be asked about.

Presets on several speakers

Speakers that share one AfterTouch account share their presets: saving or clearing a preset on one applies it to the others. How quickly they show it depends on your setup, see “When the other speakers pick it up” below.

What happens by default:

• One speaker, or speakers that already hold the same presets: sharing is on, so a change reaches all of them.
• A speaker added later with no presets: it adopts the account’s presets.
• Speakers that already hold different presets: nothing is overwritten. AfterTouch leaves them as they are until you say which way it should go.

To change that for an account:

curl -X POST http://192.0.2.10:8000/api/mgmt/accounts/<accountId>/preset-sync \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"preset_sync": "on"}'

on always shares a change, off never overwrites another speaker’s preset (a speaker with no presets still adopts them, since nothing is lost that way), and auto is the default described above.

A shared preset needs a matching source on the other speaker

Sharing writes the preset, not a guarantee that the other speaker can play it. Before AfterTouch copies the slot over, it checks whether that speaker has the source the preset needs:

• TuneIn, Radio Browser, Local Internet Radio: if the speaker does not have the source yet, AfterTouch adds its own canonical entry for it first, the same one every speaker gets on pairing, then writes the preset. No credential is copied from anywhere.
• A media server (STORED_MUSIC): AfterTouch does not add this from the sharing path. Registering a media server account happens on the speaker itself, and preset sharing has no way to reach a speaker for that; if the target speaker has not already discovered the same server, the preset is not shared to it.
• Spotify, Amazon, and other linked music services: never added here. Each speaker has to link its own credential, and nothing in AfterTouch may copy one from another speaker. If the target does not already have the same account linked, the preset is not shared to it.

A preset that is not shared for this reason is logged ([PresetSync]) and leaves the target speaker’s other presets untouched; nothing shows this in the UI yet.

Sharing a preset is not the same as “Sync Data”

The two move in opposite directions, which is easy to mix up:

An import takes the list exactly as that one speaker reports it at that moment. If that list is shorter or out of date, handing it to every other speaker would spread the loss, so an import is never shared. AfterTouch even refuses an import that would shrink what it already holds, unless you confirm it.

When the other speakers pick it up

Storing the preset in AfterTouch is the sharing. The speakers fetch their own presets, so each one picks the change up by itself: at its next fetch, when it is switched on or rebooted, or when you press “Refresh sources on speaker”.

Where AfterTouch can reach the speakers, it also nudges them, and the change shows up within seconds. That nudge is an accelerator, not the mechanism: if AfterTouch runs somewhere it cannot reach them (a public cloud host, for example), the presets still arrive, just whenever the speakers next ask.

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 works too. The speaker’s radio module fetches the preset’s location and expects a station description in return, not audio, so AfterTouch serves that description. The CLI wraps the stream URL 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"

The stored location looks like /station?data=..., without a host. The speaker adds AfterTouch’s address from its service registry, the same way it does for TuneIn and Radio Browser, so the preset keeps working when AfterTouch moves to another address (issue 769). The player’s Play URL stores the same form.

--service-url used to be required here. It is still accepted, so existing scripts keep working, but it is ignored. A location that already is a station URL (/station?data=..., or a full https://<host>/core02/svc-bmx-adapter-orion/prod/orion/station?data=... when you want a fixed host on purpose) is stored as given.

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. A LOCAL_INTERNET_RADIO preset saved before issue 769 was fixed stores AfterTouch’s full address; the Health tab flags those and can store them again in the relative form (see Play URL radio presets stop playing after moving AfterTouch). A raw stream URL stored by an older CLI without --service-url never played: store it again.

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.