I’ve been thinking more about leveraging the technology that surrounds me to automate aspects of my life. I decided that it would be nice to wake up to my iTunes music and/or streaming radio. A quick search brought up a number of programs that would do just that, but most of them were shareware, and would eventually ask me for money, and I’m kind of a do-it-yourselfer, at least when it comes to computer stuff. I’d played with Automater a bit, so I figured it couldn’t be that hard to automate something like that. Here’s what I did:
1. Open Automater. Click on iTunes and drag over a “Find iTunes Items” action.
2. Configure it to find the stuff you want to wake up to. Here’s where you can get creative. I have a playlist containing just a stream of our local NPR station, WBUR. So I set the action to “Find Playlists Whose Name Contains WBUR”. But you can also search for songs, based on name, genre, artist, album, or just about any other property.
3. Next drag over a “Play iTunes Playlist” action under the first action.
4. Save this both as a workflow, so you can edit it later, and an app, so it can be run.
5. Quit Automator and open iCal and create a new Event. Name it “Alarm Clock” or whatever.
6. Set the event to start at the time you want to wake up.
7. Under “Repeat”, choose “Custom” and enter the days that you want to be woken up. I set Monday through Friday.
8. Under “Alarm”, choose “Open File” and browse to the Automator app you just created, and set it to go off “0 minutes before”.
9. You can now close iCal and iTunes and Automator. When the alarm time comes, iCal will run in the background and open your app, which will open iTunes, find your chosen songs/playlists and start playing them.
I tested it out a few times on times a minute or two into the future and it worked, and then did a set-it-and-forget-it and it just woke me up this morning. I suppose I could add to it, letting it open my mail program, getting my morning mail, and a browser with the morning’s news and feeds. Might have to rig up an external port to my coffee maker…
If you wanted to get really hard core, you could go into the Energy Saver preferences and set your Mac to wake up every day just before the alarm is scheduled to run. That way you can even turn your Mac off at night and still use it as an alarm clock. It also guards against those middle-of-the-night power outages where you wake up to find your alarm clock flashing 12:00.
well, i tried your formula to make wise use of automator to function as an alarm clock but it failed. did you explain correctly? onec the automator wake up by the ical alarm, it just stop there… until you use your mouse cursor to click the play button only the automator will function. did you left out some steps?… help…..
See step 4.
4. Save this both as a workflow, so you can edit it later, and an app, so it can be run.
It’s important that you save the Automator workflow as an app. Then in step 8…
8. Under “Alarm”, choose “Open File” and browse to the Automator app you just created, and set it to go off “0 minutes before”.
Have iCal run the APP, not the WORKFLOW.
hi, thanks… it’s my mistake. it works well now
I love this program! thanks,I like to add to turn on the visualizer after it starts playing your playlist or whatever. Its alot nicer to wake up to
Kp, this has really helped, thank you!
I have a doubt, my account is password protected and you need to input the password to wake it up, if the computer sleeps (which it does overnight) ical won’t go off. Can this be solved? Thanks…
Tomas
Sorry, I had done some things wrong, it finally did work. I have another question, anyhow. Is there any way to set the option of shuffling the playlist?
Once again, I found the solution, seems that all you have to do is tick a box.. thank you!
Tomas
Thanks heaps! Worked perfectly for me, great instructions 🙂
I was wondering how you can get it to turn on the computer instead of just being asleep and also would it be possible to have the screen shut when the computer is off or so i have to leave it open?
Thanks
Tomas,
How did you figure out how to get past your password protection to open the file upon the automated computer start up… Mine does not work until it gets past this point??????
Anyone Know?