Ever wondered if you can go to bed and fall asleep with some iTunes music on the background without having the music play all night long? Ever wondered if you can be woken up by your iTunes music or an internet radio station? Ever wondered if you can do both of this without having your computer consume valuable power during the night when it’s essentially not used? You can do all three of these with a few handy little tools for iTunes and Windows that I’ll briefly describe here. For more information I advise you to check out the respective websites.

Sleep Timer

Like many others, I guess, I like falling asleep with some relaxing music. In my childhood I frequently used the sleep function of my hifi system, but since I only use my computer for playing music these days, that’s kind of ‘old-fashioned’. But is there a sleep function for iTunes? Well, there is actually. It’s called ‘Abbie’s Sleep Timer’ and is available here. Basically what you do is start iTunes and play whatever playlist or Party Shuffle you want and start the Sleep Timer. You set a time period (usually I use 30 minutes) and you let it either just pause iTunes or have it put your computer in Standby or shut it down completely. You get in your bed, enjoy the music, fall asleep and when you accidentally wake up a few hours later there won’t be any music ;).

Alarm Clock

Getting annoyed of the annoying **beep** **beep** **beep** of your alarm clock? You can have iTunes play some playlist at a certain time to wake up. You can even have it gradually increase the volume so you’re not blown out of your bed in an instant. In the playlist you can even add online radio stations if you like those. The utility I use for this is called ‘iSnooze’ and is available here. This utility sits in your system tray and fires up iTunes at the time you asked it to (every weekday at 7.30 am for example). I have it fire up iTunes 3 minutes before my usual alarm clock goes off. I have it increase the volume gradually during 1 minute and I let it play a playlist of some songs with beat combined with some cool radio stations.

Waking up your computer from Standby

Now… how can you use both of these utilities without having your computer waste valuable power and have it make noise all night long? Well… there’s this utility called ‘WakeupOnStandBy’ available here which wakes up your computer from standby (duh!). Combined with the previous two utilities you can have your computer go to standby using Abbie’s Sleep Timer, have it wake up automatically say 10 minutes before your alarm is supposed to go off using WakeupOnStandBy, and then have it start playing music using iSnooze. Neat isn’t it? :D

Notes:

• When you go to bed, you’ll have to lower the volume of iTunes to say 20% in the program itself if you want to fall asleep with music at a low volume and wake up at a high volume.
• You can start WakeupOnStandBy using the command line and have it automatically start from there on. For example you can make a batch file called ‘wosb.bat’ with the following command: start wosb.exe /run /systray /ami date=+1 time="7:20 am" file="wosb.bat" If you run this batch file, your computer will wake up from standby on the next day (+1) at 7.20 am and run the batch file again scheduling a new wakeup on the next day. For more information on the command line options check the WakeupOnStandBy website.