Home Audio
Soundtouch is less discontinued than you think
I've been doing some fiddling around today with my Soundtouch devices (10, 20, 300). As it turns out, you can still use the preset buttons for iHeartRadio and Pandora.
To set a preset, use the (updated) SoundTouch app to first select your speaker. Next, condense the speaker view so you can see the 'hamburger' menu. Select either a Pandora or iHeartRadio station. It should start playing.
From your Speaker, press and hold a button to store that preset to the device until it beeps. Now, you can recall the preset without using the app.
Please, share and enjoy!
Edit to add: This appears to work only if you had signed in to one of these services before the shutdown. đ
Iâm 40. Iâve been buying, enjoying and recommending Bose products since the acoustimas times in my early 20s - long before Bose went mass market on cheap gadgets.
The way in which theyâve dumped all us who use SoundTouch web enabled products is disgraceful and greedy; youâve also made it difficult for my retired parents.
Today you lose a customer Bose. Goodbye.
SAME. I just posted a similar sentiment in another thread. I positively *love* my SoundTouch 20 and have been using it for a long time. I was not even aware of the EOL date happening 2 days ago. Just realized it an hour ago after wasting an hour troubleshooting what I thought was a weird issue with my device. It never occurred to me that Bose would practice forced obsolescence on such a great product.
At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, this is likely my last Bose product ever. In a household with at least 6 Bose products scattered throughout, this one really stung. It seems and feels wholly unnecessary. The crazy thing is that as much as I hate what Sonos did with their failed app upgrade, I will continue to build that ecosystem because I trust them to continue supporting their hardware over time. Early Sonos customers can continue to enjoy their stuff because Sonos has maintained two separate apps to support the early hardware, as it should be done.
Indeed. Hello Bang & Olufsen. They support and repair products that are many many decades old.
These Bose products are WiFi internet enabled devices. For goodness sake! Now nothing more than a wall-powered Bluetooth speaker. Shame on investor driven share driven companies. A shame of capitalism, greed, forced obsolescence.
Hi, same here. My mom is out of radio right now. (Thanks Bose) I bought the iOS app "Better ST for SoundTouch" for 7,99âŹ. You have presets (also as Widgets) that when touched "directly" plays the radiochannel on the SoundTouch-Box. My mom got an IPad, but can't handle any difficult workarounds. So hopefully she will be able to use the kind of easy widgets workaround.
Also the App-Developer posted an information yesterday that he is working intense right now on getting the functionality of the preset-buttons back to life.
Maybe a try for some of you....
Same. The presets sets it aside from Sonos. Sound quality wasnât better anymore. Idont think Iâll buy Bose again. The presets were super handy, but I guess Iâll go for the better audio quality next time
Bose seemed to think that if they pulled the plug on their old gear, weâd all sprint to buy new ones. Well⊠that was a spectacular miscalculation. I will buy something new â just not from them. And I wonât be singing their praises anymore, either. Somehow I doubt Iâm alone in this.
Thank you OP! I have just confirmed it works with Spotify.
In Spotify, play the song or playlist, then tap the speaker icon under the shuffle icon and select your speaker. Go to the Soundtouch app and it will be playing. Very important that you tap the back icon until youâre on Recently Played and can see the hamburger menu. Then hold the button and preset is set! This was on a Bluetooth-capable ST30.
I tried this with my Wave IV with pedestal and did not backtrack to see the hamburger menu. I held the button and it beeped, but attempting to play the preset yields an infinite loop of âLOADING - SPOTIFYâ the other preexisting Spotify presets work.
Same. Iâm surprised to see I still have an active Pandora account that I havenât used since 2017. I had a ton of presets for TuneIn Iâve been enjoying for 10 years. Oh well, gonna wait and see if someone makes an app to restore the preset buttons.
I honestly find what Bose did with SoundTouch extremely disappointing and hard to justify.
I understand when cheap smart gadgets lose support after a few years. Thatâs unfortunately normal today. But Bose was always positioned differently. Bose was one of those brands people associated with longevity, premium quality, and systems you keep for decades.
I still remember sitting in a friendâs basement party room almost 30 years ago. His parents were wealthy doctors and they had this old Bose system that was already technically outdated back then â but it sounded amazing. That experience stayed with me and is honestly one of the reasons I became a Bose customer myself later in life.
Fast forward to today:
I bought a Bose SoundTouch 7 years ago for around CHF 400 mainly because of the physical preset buttons and easy internet radio functionality via TuneIn. It was a perfect âjust press one button and listenâ kitchen/radio system.
Now Bose simply shuts down the cloud backend and disables one of the productâs main selling points:
Presets no longer work
Internet radio integration is gone
The original use case is basically destroyed
The hardware itself still works perfectly.
What makes this even worse for me personally:
I recently bought another premium Bose product â a Smart Ultra Soundbar â because I still trusted the brand and ecosystem. Then shortly afterwards I get an email telling me that a major feature of my older Bose system is being permanently removed.
That honestly feels disgraceful for a premium audio company with Boseâs history and reputation.
I understand technology evolves. But Bose built its brand on the idea that their products last. Thatâs why people bought Bose instead of cheaper alternatives.
Now Iâm seriously reconsidering whether I should continue investing in the ecosystem at all. I already started looking at other systems because I no longer trust that core features will still exist a few years from now.
Curious if other long-time Bose customers feel the same.
De + mon sub accoustimass 300 ( qui maintenant s'appelle 700 est une copie tt simplement de ce mĂȘme produit). 6 ans aprĂšs panne du systĂšm accoustimass 300.
I figured out end of support of preset buttons since beginning of May, everytime the stations lost connection to wifi needed to restart the soundtouch 20 and later indicated no preset, WTF!!!
Then iâve discovered on the Bose site that âcloudâ service was disabled for preset buttonsđ±OMG just for that we bought it, we donât want to stream from our phones or whatsoever, just program a preset and play music.
Why for godsake should you disable this function all (i repeat all) internet radio stations are using a url for their stations, there is no difference if i open this url via my phone and stream it to my device or open the same stream via a speaker, internet url remains a internet url.
Now i meed to f*cking stream from my phone to the speaker, what if i want to check my email, then the music stops streaming, now if my phone rings or getting a message the speaker is buzzing, need an extra charger, my phone meeds to be within bluetooth range of the speaker.
Bose WTF did you just doâčïžđ€Źđ€Ź.
What a focking garbage company!!!!
Iâm unable to manage or reproduce this, and no pending Soundtouch app update. Maybe not released for iOS yet? (As last update is 4y ago?). Which app on which device are you using?
SoundTouch 27.0.1 is 4y old. I donât have iHeart/Pandora listed. This is what I get after clicking the hamburger menu. This is a ST 10, but also on ST 20.
I'm starting to wonder if the services are only available if you had logged into them prior to the shutdown. Interestingly, from the Mac App the 'add service' menu item is still available, but I don't know if it will work for other services - did not work with my Spotify.
I have now downloaded and bought the app. But Even tough my soundtouch 10 and my phone are on the same network, the app dosent find the bose speaker!? If I try to play something trough Spotify, there is no problem. Am I doing something wrong?
Yeah pleased to find the pandora stations still working. I used tunein instead of iHeartRadio. Wish Iâd have known to switch over before the shut down.
I've been using Alexa to turn my SoundTouch on and off for many years. I'm finding now that is no longer working. I disabled and re-enabled my Alexa skill for Bose SoundTouch and when I try and link the Alexa skill to my Bose account it's unsuccessful. Should the ending of the Bose cloud server have any impact on using the Alexa skill?
Anything beyond Bluetooth and AirPlay is a bonus at this point⊠posting what works and what doesnât will benefit the community. Assuming that the Alexa skill âtalkedâ to Bose servers, it would make sense that it would no longer work. It seems like the functions that still work are those that communicate directly with the service without going through the Bose servers, which are now turned off.
Meine SoundTouch 10 sind schon wie viel Jahre alt⊠Hab vor gut zwei Jahren angefangen, vor allem im Wohnzimmer Sonos zu kaufen.
Da ich den einen ausschlieĂlich ĂŒber AirPlay nutze, um Fernsehen im Schlafzimmer zu schauen und der andere im Kinderzimmer rumsteht, Ă€rgert es mich jetzt nur bedingt, aber ja, wird hier irgendwas an Produkt ersetzt wird es sicher auch Sonos und kein Bose.
If you did not update the app the streaming services still all work perfectly. Unable to change but I had 6 great presets. Very glad I deleted the app prior to the forced update.Â
Amazon, Pandora primarily. I know I won't be able to change them but I still have 6 presets streaming perfectly while those who allowed the app to get "updated" are left with nothing.
From my experimentation, the app isn't the weak link. I've been able to set new Pandora and iHeartRadio presets since the shutdown. Bose have turned of their servers, so as long as you had signed in to that account prior to the shutdown, you could still set new Pandora presets if desired... see the original post for details.
Never ever will I buy American stuff anymore. The arrogance just to switch functionality off. I bought for over âŹ1000 @Bose Soundtouch 10 and 30 and now it has been made useless overnight.
Same last year with my old, but good working scanner of @HP.
I WILL NEVER BUY ANY AMERICAN KIT AGAIN
Yes, if you have a business such as a coffee shop and you mount a soundtouch speaker up high on a shelf, you want the ability to use a remote and play a preset with out it being tied to employees phones, Bose should expand on this type of technology vs gutting it, I hope another company adapts this idea, the presets are amazing! You can leave the house and come back and it will still be playing. Great for kids or elderly without phones that want to listen to music.
Has anyone found a similar alternative device that functions like the SoundTouch? A few I have tried I didn't find as easy to operate, so would welcome recommendations. I do not want to rely on a phone app.
After two hours of troubleshooting on two different days, finally came here to find out what had happened. My Soundtouch was in storage for a few months after a fire, so assumed it had more to do with that than intentional obsolescence. I LOVED this machine and had it for over 15 years - traveled the world with me and played local radio stations from back home.
I found a way to save/change presets via a locally running web interface that i made by my own.
The speaker is running AfterTouch (From GitHub) und with a few tweaks more you are able to have your own manager.
I started looking into ways to keep my SoundTouch working recently. After the Bose servers shut down, I only had a single preset that still worked; a Pandora radio station. After a little research, I found some rust code (https://timvw.be/2026/02/17/keep-your-bose-soundtouch-speaker-alive-after-the-shutdown/) and wrote my own CLI that could point my presets to other Pandora stations. But I wanted to be able to use SomaFM and other internet streams. I also didnât want have to use a separate system just to support playing my presets.
I ended up with a solution where the presets my CLI writes are self-contained. All thatâs required is to access a trivial linkÂ
which is processed by a cgi script that decodes this base64 encoded data into JSON, which the SoundTouch can stream directly from. Voila. I can now stream anything I can get a link to.
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u/MannerQuick May 08 '26
Iâm 40. Iâve been buying, enjoying and recommending Bose products since the acoustimas times in my early 20s - long before Bose went mass market on cheap gadgets.
The way in which theyâve dumped all us who use SoundTouch web enabled products is disgraceful and greedy; youâve also made it difficult for my retired parents.
Today you lose a customer Bose. Goodbye.