Bose killed SoundTouch cloud. AI couldn't find solutions but helped me code fast. The actual ideas were mine.

My SoundTouch 20 traveled with me across countries for years. Physical preset buttons for TuneIn and Spotify, no phone required — exactly why I chose it!

Then it stopped working. Bose had quietly shut down their cloud infrastructure for the entire lineup. What remained: AirPlay. My carefully chosen autonomous speaker was now just another Bluetooth box.

I wasn't buying a new speaker. Here's the full story.

Round 1 — ChatGPT

Found the published SoundTouch Web API (Bose actually released it in January 2026 — four months before shutdown, great timing), brought in ChatGPT. We couldn't get MP3 streams into the speaker, and GPT started suggesting I use a Raspberry Pi as a media server and accept that presets were dead. But what would I even stream from? The SoundTouch app was already empty.

That's when I remembered the WebSocket API on port 8080 of SoundTouch.

Once we found it, a stream played almost immediately. Short-lived victory — anything not plain MP3 failed, presets refused to stick, GPT was losing confidence again.

Round 2 — Claude

Switched to Claude, moved faster. We wrote a streaming relay — Python/FastAPI on a tiny VPS (500MB RAM, 1 vCPU) that proxies radio streams, resolves radio station IDs to direct stream URLs, converts HTTPS to HTTP (the speaker can't handle it), and deduplicates upstreams for multiple speakers.

That worked!

But presets still failed on playback. Claude's theory: the speaker was trying to authenticate against Bose cloud before playing. Stuck again.

Then I remembered WebSockets. Again.

The button fix — NI (Natural Intelligence) enters

I went looking for button press traces in the WebSocket stream. Found nowSelectionUpdated events immediately on port 8080, Bose's proprietary gabbo protocol.

Then the idea hit me: I had an M5Stack Atom Lite (ESP32) sitting unused. What if it lived on the local network, watched the WebSocket, and whenever it caught a preset button press — instead of letting the speaker silently fail — it grabbed the URL from the event and just fired it back at the speaker via AVTransport?

Claude helped to write the firmware faster. It worked. Physical buttons restored.

The Atom Lite also got auto-discovery (scans 192.168.x.x for /info endpoint with SoundTouch in <type>), WiFiManager for zero-config WiFi setup, NVS persistence for the speaker IP, and polls a "play queue" on the VPS every 2 minutes.

Remote control without local server access

Wanted a web page on the VPS with a Play button.

Problem: speaker is on the LAN, browser isn't. AI had nothing clean here.

My solution: all devices on my LAN share the same external IP. Added a Redis queue to the relay. Hit Play on the web page → writes command keyed to my external IP → Atom Lite polls relay from the same IP → picks it up → fires AVTransport at the speaker. No tunnel, no local server, no app.

The display name problem

The speaker has a small display. I wanted station names on it. Spent way too long with Claude trying every DIDL-Lite metadata combination possible.

Result: you can have the name on display OR save as preset. Not both.

If you include <res> in DIDL (required for the title to render), the speaker sets isPresetable="false". Tested every protocolInfo variant. Same result every time.

Compromise: streams from web UI → no DIDL → saves as preset, blank display. Preset button presses → full DIDL with name and logo → shows on display, can't save again. Not perfect, but I'll take it.

What's in the repo

• Python relay: TuneIn resolver, HTTPS proxy, ring buffer for reconnecting clients (hides the ~17s reconnect gap), Redis persistence, dedup across speakers
• Station catalogue web UI: add your station, search, favourites per-IP
• Push-to-device queue (the shared-IP Redis trick)
• M5Stack Atom Lite firmware: WiFiManager, auto-discovery, WebSocket interceptor, DIDL metadata for display names

https://github.com/sergei-ponomarenko/bose-soundtouch/ — MIT

Honest take on AI tools here

Claude and ChatGPT were genuinely useful for writing code fast, reading protocol specs, and debugging. But both of them gave up at the actual decision points — "presets are dead," "you need a Raspberry Pi," "there's no way to do this without a local server."

Every idea that unblocked the project came from me. The WebSocket trick, the ESP32 interceptor, the shared-IP queue.

That's a realistic picture of where these tools are right now. Excellent execution accelerators. Not yet idea generators when things get weird.

Happy to answer questions. The DIDL rabbit hole alone was worth posting about.

PS: Bose disappointed me deeply though. The hardware is solid. They could have kept a minimal open API running. Instead they shipped a cloud-dependent product, published their own API spec four months before shutdown, and left customers with expensive paperwork weights.

Not buying Bose again.

I always thought the whole “lossless audio” thing was exaggerated.

Like sure — maybe trained audiophile ears with insanely expensive gear could hear a difference… but for normal listeners? Probably placebo.

Then Spotify rolled out lossless audio.

I enabled:
Lossless 24-bit FLAC streaming
wired listening on my Sony XM5s
USB audio to my old Bose Companion 5 speakers
Spotify Connect over Wi-Fi to my Bose home theater

And within the first few songs, I had one of those:

“Oh no… now I can never go back.” moments.

The biggest surprise? It wasn’t just “more detail.”
It was:
cleaner instrument separation,
wider sense of space,
smoother highs,
tighter bass texture,
more natural vocals,
and less listening fatigue overall.

The first artist that genuinely blew me away was A. R. Rahman and coke studio tracks from him and coke studio pakistan India and Bangladesh.

Tracks I’ve heard hundreds of times suddenly felt bigger, deeper, and more cinematic and immersive.

Then I tried:

Random Access Memories
Hotel California (Hell Freezes Over live)
Hans Zimmer soundtracks

…and that was basically the end of my casual relationship with compressed audio.

The funniest part?
I didn’t even buy new gear.

I already had decent hardware. I just finally started feeding it high-quality audio.

As someone who also works in photography and medical imaging technology, the experience reminded me a lot of:

switching from JPEG to RAW photography,
or viewing compressed versus lossless DICOM medical images.

You don’t realize how much information was missing until you suddenly experience it properly.

Now I completely understand why people fall into the audio rabbit hole.

And I’m slightly worried for my wallet.

Bose SoundLink revolver 2 is it good deal?

I have a 5.1 Samsung setup currently and am looking to upgrade. I found this on Facebook marketplace. It was originally $1300 but marked down to $500 for a quick sale. Does anyone have experience with this and can tell me how it is? The lady said works like new and was bought 2 years ago.

Hi everyone, John here (developer of the Controller Pro app). It’s been a crazy couple of weeks since Bose permanently shut down the SoundTouch cloud servers. I’ve received hundreds of support emails, and I wanted to clear up a few technical realities about what our speakers can—and cannot—do anymore.

1. Why does my app (and others) use Bluetooth/AirPlay now?
   When Bose shut down the servers, they didn't just retire an app; they locked the internal Wi-Fi streaming brain of the speaker itself. It physically cannot fetch internet radio on its own anymore. To save your speakers from becoming paperweights, Controller Pro acts as a 'bridge'—fetching the stream to your phone and casting it over. We are strictly limited to the ACTUAL features Bose left unlocked on the hardware.

2. What about my physical 1-6 Preset Buttons?
   Because those physical buttons were hardwired to Bose's dead servers, no local app can reprogram them to play web radio exactly like they used to.

However, there are solutions out there for everyone! If you are using the brilliant 'Bosman' workaround to get your presets working, you can absolutely run it alongside Controller Pro. Bosman carries a subscription fee and requires altering your network/DNS, but it fixes the buttons. Controller Pro is a one-time purchase, requires zero network hacking, and handles your local NAS drives, grouping, and Bluetooth. They actually work perfectly together!

3. The Ultimate Fix is Coming.
   If you hate tying up your phone with Bluetooth/AirPlay and just want a truly independent Wi-Fi speaker again, I am currently building a plug-and-play hardware fix called the Rescue Node.

Think of it as a brain transplant for your speaker. It bypasses the dead Bose software entirely, plugging straight into the AUX port and using the existing app to seamlessly play exactly the stream you want—without tying up your phone, draining your battery, or clashing with things like Bluetooth hearing aids.

I’ll be sharing photos of the workbench prototypes soon. If you want to be the first to know when the first batch drops, you can join the early-bird waitlist here: https://forms.gle/i5rLyxhiRPy89Wx79

Keep the music playing! 🎵
John

Pretty sure our old Bose system (which we still love) is a Lifestyle v20. Remote in bad shape—anyone know of a good universal that would work with Bose and TV?

MTW4 is the best earbuds out there in the world prove me other wise. The first wireless buds in the world are from Sennheiser (Sennheiser MX W1 2008). When it comes to Netflix Spacial audio in the premium plan Sennheiser Ambeo Technology is used. Sennheiser is always a head of it's Curve when it comes to technology.

My mom bought the qc ultra gen 2 bose earbuds for 348 usd it looks off is it fake? Thought the earbuds looks off the logo dosent appear at the earbuds and it has a glossy shiny glittery look to it and also it dosent connect to the app and the app dosent regonise this device and not only that the earbuds sound cheap like a 10 dollar type of quality the anc dosent even work