How to get an alarm sound with continuously increasing volume on your iPhone (or Android)

Task: the sound should start from completely unhearable and then the volume should slowly ramp up within some two minutes to full device volume. The melody chosen should be freely chosen.

Background: my wive’s Ringtone is either not loud enough to wake her reliable or pushes me out of my bed. Solutions found on the web do not work for me.

My solution:

Prepare an mp3 with slowly increasing volume

I used the Android App Audio Evolution Mobile (EUR 11), but I’m quite sure Audacity on a PC will work also. As sound file, I imported Franz Liszt, Gondola (Piano, classic, melodious) as a free MIDI from the Web. I prefer MIDI’s for sounds, as the synthetic sound is noise free and allows to exploit the full speaker volume without distortions.

In the “Master” track and in the “auto” mode, one can set the time development of the master volume; I start with -96 dB, ramping up to about -40 dB within 10 seconds, then to -20 dB within the next 10 sec, and to -6 dB within the next minute. There I stay for the remainder of the clip, which is 4 min long (the claim on the web that there is a 30 or 39 minute limit for alarm sounds in iOS is wrong. this seems to be a limit by the App “GarageBand”).

Finally, I “mix”the tracks to an .mp3 with 32 bit.

For Android, you are practically raady now, just select the .mp3 file in the settings of the clock app as alarm sound.

Convert to .m4r

I used the online tool https://audio.online-convert.com/convert-to-m4r. It is important that “Normalize audio” is not checked, this destroys the increasing volume effect (something GarageBand gets wrong).

Install on iPhone

I did this with iMazing for Windows, with the free trial Version.

Tags: Custom alarm sound, iPhone