Using a Song As Your iPhone Alarm Sound

You don't have to settle for a ringtone as your iPhone's alarm sound. You can use any song in your music library. This means you can also record your own audio track, sync that through iTunes, and select that as your alarm sound. You can use that audio to give yourself reminders or other information upon waking.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's look at how you can set your alarm on your iPhone to use a song from your music library or even a piece of audio that you recorded.
So I love using my iPhone as an alarm clock. When you travel your iPhone is usually right there and it's right there with you at home. You can use it as an alarm clock wherever you go and have a lot of different options.
If you've never done it before you go to the Clock there and you can go between the different things in the Clock like world clock, alarm, stopwatch. It's alarm that you want. You can set multiple alarms which is really nice. So you can have a regular alarm for regular work days, an alarm for weekends, you can have a special alarm if you need to get up early to catch an airplane flight, or something like that. It is very easy to set these alarms and then turn them on or off. You can edit them, go into edit the time of the alarm, things like if it is going to repeat any days, that kind of thing.
The cool thing is that you can set the sound for the alarm. Now you can choose from all these different rings tones that you've got there. You can choose None and just have the phone vibrate. But you can also pick a song. You can pick any song that you have in your library and that includes songs that you may have from Apple Music.
So if you have a song from Apple Music and you've added it, it will appear here and you can add any song that you want and then it will appear there and now it will play that song as the alarm when you wake up in the morning.
In addition, of course, you can also create your own sound. You can do it as a ring tone which you can create in GarageBand or you can just drag and drop any audio file you get into your iTunes collection and sync it with your iPhone through iTunes, or add it to your music collection in iTunes and have it automatically appear through iTunes match or something, and then select that because that will appear as a song that you can then use as your alarm sound.
So let's say I wanted to record my own alarm sound. It would be very easy to do on your Mac. I would just use QuickTime Player and then do New Audio Recording and then record something like this: It is time to get up and remember to make that phone call first thing this morning.
So I've saved this as an audio file here. Just six seconds long. I'm going to save it out to the desktop. Let's give it a better name like that. Now I'm going to go into iTunes here and how you get this to your iPhone really depends on how you have things setup. I've got my iPhone selected but I have iCloud Music Library turned on. So it is going to very easy.
But if you are using the older ways, say you are syncing directly from iTunes, you are going to have to add it to your music library in iTunes here and then sync it over to your iPhone however you normally sync songs.
In the case of the iCloud Music Library since everything is being synced all you need to do is go to music here. I've got all of my music, here's all the songs. I'm just going to drag and drop this file here. You can see it adds Alarm sound here. It will eventually upload this to my iCloud Music Library and I'll have it available on my iPhone even if I don't sync or backup or do anything because my iPhone now, in a few minutes, this should appear in my music library on my iPhone.
So now you can see back in the Clock app I've got that alarm sound there. If I go to Pick Song and select songs and I scroll down to Alarm Sound, there it is. There's the sound I just recorded and it will play for me when that alarm goes off.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Using a Song As Your iPhone Alarm Sound”

8 years ago

Now if only someone could figure out how to get alarms to play through headphones only, and not the speakers AND headphones when you have headphones plugged in...

Patrice Emrie

Is there any we we can just record, say the chorus, which is in the middle of the song? And let that chorus be the beginning of our ringtone? THank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

Sure. If you can get to the sound file for that song, in your iTunes library or wherever you have it, you can edit it in GarageBand or QuickTime player or any audio editing app. Then treat the new sound file just like the audio file I show you in the second half of the video.

G Lud

you forgot to mention that Siri will set your alarm?

Comments Closed.

Using a Song As Your iPhone Alarm Sound

Comments: 4 Responses to “Using a Song As Your iPhone Alarm Sound”

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