Program your Mac to wake you up gradually with whatever music you like!

Ingredients for this recipe: iTunes, iCal and AppleScript. No scripting knowledge required, I promise.

Make your wake-up playlist

Make a playlist in iTunes that you’d like to wake up to. I like to wake up to some mellow classical or jazz radio. If you like that idea, just click each link below to download the station’s stream; double-click the downloaded file to open it in iTunes; then copy each station you like to your playlist.

• All-Classical WGBH 89.7-HD2
• KCSM Jazz 91 * The Bay Area’s Jazz Station *
• KJAZ SPIRIT- JAZZ RADIO
• KKJZ 88.1 FM
• WCPE
• WNYC
• 1.FM – Otto’s Baroque Musick

Get the wake-up AppleScript

Go to Doug’s Mac-as-iTunes-alarm-clock tutorial, but do not follow the steps in order.

Go straight to the complete script right under Step 3: Volume Up and Down. Click the little [upm] link; this will open the script in the AppleScript Editor.

Customize the script by changing the “tick” and “thismany” numbers, to adjust how quickly the volume ramps up in iTunes. And don’t forget to change “Recently Played” to the name of your own playlist!

Click the Run button to test out your script. Clever, aren’t you? :D

Now save your script, as a script, to any location on your computer you like, with any name you like.

Schedule your wake-up script in iCal

Create an iCal event at a suitable time of day. In your event, set an alarm, choose “Run Script,” and then choose your wake-up script. Set your event to repeat daily, or as desired.

Alright sleepyheads, now you just need to get to bed earlier, and waking up should be a little more pleasant! And if you’re feeling grateful, please consider making a donation to Doug.