Alarm Clock Tips

I've had several users email me recently with similar stories. They have a laptop, but they keep their giant music collection on an external drive somewhere. The problem is, they like to bring their laptop into their bedroom to use as an alarm clock, but it's a hassle to bring the external drive too. (Very understandable in my opinion...who wouldn't prefer to slowly awake to their favorite tunes over a blaring, annoying alarm clock.)

There's a very elegant solution to this. Starting with iTunes version 7, Apple introduced support for multiple iTunes libraries built right into the application. If you hold down the option key while launching iTunes, you'll be prompted with the following dialog box:



The idea here is to create a seperate iTunes library just for the alarm clock application that only contains songs on the internal hard drive. If we click "Create Library..." we can do just this. Just give the library a name:



Now you've got an empty iTunes library. Just add any songs you want that are on your built-in hard drive.



After you do this, you can quit iTunes, and relaunch holding down the option key. Then pick your original library (most likely in ~/Music/iTunes/) and you're back to your regular iTunes library.

The final step is simply to instruct Alarm Clock to use this new library that you just created. Quit the Alarm Clock application. Open up your terminal. And type in the following command:

defaults write com.digitallity.alarmclock2 'XMLPath' '/Users/robbie/Music/iTunes (AlarmClock)/iTunes Library.xml'

Replacing the last part of the command with the proper path on your machine. For more information about this tip, see my FAQ page, question number 9.

Happy Anniversary

Today was Super Bowl Sunday here in the US. This is the day when all Americans crowd around the TV and watch the championship game of "football." But for me it represents the beginning of the Alarm Clock application.

Last year I was watching the Super Bowl (and browsing the web) when I noticed that my Alarm Clock application was featured on MacBytes.com. At the time I was hosting the application on an old Linux box I had sitting in my apartment. Our Internet connection came to a screeching halt as thousands of people starting downloading the application. I had to scramble to find a web host, and that night robbiehanson.com was born.

It's been around a year since then, and the Alarm Clock application has grown and matured. It has been downloaded around 300,000 times. It's available in 16 different languages. And today it's on the front page of Apple Downloads (#5 in the iPod + iTunes category).

I'd like to thank everyone who has sent me donations, and those who have contributed by providing localizations or sending feedback.

By no means am I done developing this software. I continue to have new ideas on how to improve it, and I continually get feedback and suggestions via email and this blog which helps me improve the application.