People use music sleep timers for a myriad of reasons. Perhaps you sleep in close proximity to other people and don’t want to annoy them with your music or podcasts. If you enjoy a good audiobook before bed, a sleep timer will make sure you don’t wake up to hear the ending of the story and makes it a lot easier to resume from your last recall. For those with a weaker battery life, stopping audio from playing after you go to sleep will help you save some charge sot that you’re ready for the next day. If you’re using an iPhone, you’ll be pleased to know that this function comes built in to your device already. For those of you using Android devices, however, there’s no officially implemented sleep timer at the time of writing. Don’t despair, however; there are still ways to shut off your media after you’ve fallen asleep.
Exploring Sleep Timer Apps
The good news is there are apps out there that can help you out, and most of them are free of charge. Doing a Google Play search for “sleep timer” will bring up some solid results, including some very highly-rated apps. As such, it’s not a problem to find and download a sleep timer.
The problem is you’ll probably need to take some time to find the sleep timer. People use a myriad of different programs to stream media. There’s also a variance of what media is being played, from music to movies to podcasts. As such, you need an app that can pause the software you like using. This may take a little bit of experimentation before you find a timer compatible with your media app. The app that I gelled with is called “Super Simple Sleep Timer,” and it performs exactly how it claims. Here’s how it works.
After you download and boot up the timer, you’ll be presented with several options. The topmost one is for selecting the app you want to pause when the timer expires. Touch this open, then select the program you’ll be listening to media in. In this example we’ll pick YouTube.
Now that your program is selected, it’s time to tell the app how long to wait before pausing the media. You can do this by touching the dot on the timer wheel and moving it, as if you’re setting the time on a clock. The centre of the circle will tell you how many minutes you’ve selected, so you can set a precise time for your countdown. Once you’re finished, press the “Set Sleep Timer” button to start the countdown.
Once the timer has started, it will appear in your notifications bar. From here you can see the precise time the media will stop playing. If you’re feeling insomnia setting in, you can cancel the timer by pressing the “Cancel” button. You can also add another 5 minutes if you’re getting to a particularly good part of a story by pressing the “5 mins” button. Once this timer expires, the media you selected will automatically pause itself.
Don’t Lose Sleep Over Timers
Given Android’s lack of a built-in sleep timer, users have to turn to third-party apps to fit their needs. This can be annoying, as not all timers work with the software you’ll want it to work with. With some experimentation, however, you can hopefully find a music sleep timer that suits your bedtime-listening needs.
