Maybe my new year’s resolution could be to try and write in English every now and then. Besides, I believe this might be interesting for the English-speaking audience as well. I noticed that with certain iPod speakers one is able to use actual songs as alarm tones instead of the normal beeping sounds.

Coupled with a dockable speaker set, my old iPod nano was a handy alarm clock, letting me wake up to music of my liking. As always, there were some gripes: the songs could not be selected freely, as only pre-made playlists were allowed. On-the-go playlists weren’t available either, so one had to plug the player to the computer to select the songs, which was rather tedious to do when going to sleep.

Until some firmware version, it was also common that the iPod started playing automatically in the morning even when it had been forgotten in a pocket somewhere, hence draining the battery and messing up the playcounts. I’m not sure but I believe that after an update it only started playing when there were headphones or a speaker attached to it, which mostly solved the problem.

My new iPod touch is different. It only lets me use irritating beeps as alarm tone. When played through the internal speaker, the volume is so low it hardly wakes anyone up. When the iPod is connected to speakers with the dock connector, the sound is played through the speakers but is irritating, nevertheless. Having googled around, I found out that I’m not the only one with the problem.

I discovered by accident a method which lets me use the songs as alarm tones but this likely only works with certain iPod speakers. I have a Logitech mm50 speaker set (actually Logicool because I bought it from Japan) which wakes up automatically when the iPod is set to play and also pauses the iPod when the speaker is turned off.

The trick is first to set the alarm as usual. Then set the iPod to play the wanted song and dock it to the speakers. Now, turn off the speakers. When the time of the alarm comes, the iPod wakes up and resumes playing, hence waking up the speakers – and hopefully the user, too.

You mileage may wary, I haven’t been able to test this with other speakers yet. As far as I know, iPhones are plagued with the same limitation and likely benefit from the solution, too.