“Wake me up to my ‘Tunes” alarm clock applications seem to be there ever since iTunes has existed. To be able to have your Mac sing you your favourite tunes as you wake up is just evolutionary from that annoying “bhraang!” of the old school days. These apps however have matured in form, function, and the ability to make sure you actually do wake up. Here’s a look at 6 of them, right from simple free ones to complex ones that will cook your breakfast along with dressing you up.

Alarm Clock 2.0

First let’s see what the free client offers. With Alarm Clock, you can create a new alarm that will start playing an iTunes playlist. You can set it to repeat on certain days of the week, add a particular time, choose your playlist, Shuffle or straight, and enable “Easy Wake”. The alarm will kick in at the time (in a neat little HUD on your desktop), and everyone’s happy.

Alarm Clock 2.0 features ‘easy wake’, which will fade in your music as the alarm kicks in making your waking hours gentle. Use this feature carefully though, for if you need to wake up before your time is up, this music is just going to seep into your dreams. As far as customisations go, Alarm Clock 2.0 is pretty generous. You can adjust output volume, snooze duration, and alarm clock length (which oddly is 15 minutes minimum). The app also allows you to wake the computer from sleep. Even leaving aside the amazing price of free, I couldn’t find anything to complain about in Alarm Clock 2.0.

But, while there’s nothing to complain about in the free app, there’s nothing to look forward to, that makes the difference between good and awesome.

Aurora

If the app comes with a cool and soothing name like “Aurora”, you know it’s got something others don’t. Aurora features three panes: Alarms, Playback, and Fall Asleep.

Creating a new alarm is dead simple and intuitive. You set the days, time, playlist, etc all in a single window that’s dead simple to understand. You can even drag in any file, application, or script to be run during the time of alarm. And at the end of all this, you can test the alarm in the playback window. One nice feature that Aurora claims to have is the ability to wake your Mac from a powered down state. Unfortunately, this didn’t work for me.

The Fall Asleep window is what others call a sleep timer. However, Aurora has got some really good options for going to sleep, including “After x iTunes tracks have played” or “Once QuickTime has finished playing”. You can fade out your display, reduce brightness, and then sleep or shut down your Mac. At 15EUR (~$22), Aurora is not cheap. Aurora.

Alarm Clock Pro

A boring name—this one probably optimised for search engines—generally comes with a boring user interface. There’s nothing wrong with this UI, except there’s nothing right. To live up to its “Pro” tag, Alarm Clock Pro tends to float on the bloat side of things.

Apart from the standard alarm feature it’s got a calendar pop up, Chronoindex, stopwatch, time zones, and even system uptime in the toolbar! As for creating the alarms themselves, it’s a total mess. You are taken though a fairly complex 5-step wizard, involving varying levels of complexity along the way.

Now that I’m done complaining, I will admit it definitely holds the “Pro” flag waving high. You can show alerts, perform actionscripts, compose and send an email, ping servers, take snapshots using iSight or of your desktop, and last but not to be forgotten, your iTunes library.

While I’m totally not thrilled that you have to do all that to create a simple alarm (there needs to be a simple/advanced mode is all I ask), the power that this application brings in automated tasks is pretty impressive. At $20 for a piece, it’s worth it if the rest of the features interest you. Alarm Clock Pro.

Awaken

The one I’ve been using as my own alarm clock for a long time now, Awaken from Embraceware is just elegant, functional, and feature rich. Apart from the regular ‘alarm’ features, Awaken makes sure that if iTunes fails to play something it will trigger an emergency alarm. You can launch files during an alarm, or just launch files instead of an alarm.

Awaken can display your alarm either in its small window, or in full screen akin to the Front Row of yesteryears. For controlling the alarm from the bed, you can use the Apple Remote for more than just stopping your alarm. In the preferences, you can set individual volumes for iTunes and the System (I hate that!), gradually increase volume, and a whole lot of other customisations.

The beauty of Awaken is that it keeps its core functionality set on waking you up, and it does it well. There’s no complexity in the user interface, nor does it have a deficiency of customisation options. When it comes to sleep timer options however, Awaken is pretty deficient, and Aurora definitely blows it out the water. However, at $15 for a license, Awaken is quite affordable for an alarm clock. Awaken.

Sleep Blaster

The USP of Sleep Blaster is the ability to yell at your Mac to tell it to shut down. However, just as all the soldiers could not put humpty-dumpty back together, neither can Sleep Blaster actually perform that function for real.

Setting your default alarm is pretty much the same as all other apps, but the one preference you get is to enable voice controls. This allows you to set how far away from your computer you are, as well as customise how long the music plays for and then pauses. Wait, what? Yes, the music plays for a few seconds, then pauses, then plays again, and only during those pauses can you actually shout out to your Mac. While I admit the shouting bit was fun one morning (read: 4 p.m.), it wasn’t that effective in that I was annoyed my music was playing in bits and pieces, and I had to wait for the gap to shout out.

Sleep blaster also has a “Dynamite Mode” which instead of playing iTunes music blasts you with a rocket bomb and emergency alarm sounds. However, this lasts for 3-4 seconds after which you experience radio silence. I don’t think Sleep Blaster is a real alarm you can trust, so the gimmicky feature is okay to try out during its 14 day trial period. Sleep Blaster.

iRooster

An extremely simple (and badly designed) app, iRooster wastes tons of space on empty pixels. To add a new alarm you have to double click in the empty space for the new alarm to pop up, which allows you to set a new alarm. You can also use the sleep timer, but that’s only available via the menubar. Why this isn’t in the app window, don’t ask. The app is also very buggy (spinning multi-coloured pizzas all over) and I just can’t trust it.

I was thoroughly unimpressed with the app, and although it’s still a fairly capable alarm clock, at $10 for a license I’d recommend you take a look at something else. iRooster.

Waking up to what?

After real world testing of all these apps (yes, even the dynamite mode which didn’t work by the way), I have to settle on Awaken. This could however be because I’m more familiar with the app, as Aurora not only matches it in terms of ease of use, it has splendid Fall Sleep modes. That said, Awaken is a little more reliable since it plays the emergency alarm if iTunes stops responding, and is much nicer to look at especially in full screen. And its Apple Remote support is really well done. If Brace could only get that sleep timer more functional, Awaken would stand undefeated.

[Header img via Flickr]