Alarm Clock Tips & Tricks

The tips below cover techniques and features to help you avoid mistakes, save time, and get more value from your alarm clock setups.

Common Uses for Our Multi-Alarm Clocks

Class schedules
Business hours and lunch breaks
Factory shifts throughout the day
Work and break periods

Use Alarm Colors to Track Time Periods

Setting a color with your alarms is optional, but alarm colors can convey time periods at a glance. You have 25 alarms available and each one can have a target time and a color. As time passes, the display changes to color set for each alarm time. Your alarms don't have to have a sound, and you can use color, and possibly the title, of the time display to convey meaning.

Use Keyboard Shortcuts for Speed

Default keyboard shortcuts allow you to accomplish a few things quickly . . .

Show Seconds
Press the keyboard S key to show seconds in the clock time display. Great when you want to track something down to the last few seconds, stock trades, auction bids, etc. Press S key again to turn seconds off.
Stop Alarm Sound
You may have set longer alarm sounds to make sure you notice them. Once noticed a quick press of the Escape or Pause key stops the alarm sound immediately.
Cancel A Pending Ping Me Alarm
Did you set a 20 minute ping alarm to leave for a meeting, and 15 minutes later you are headed to the meeting? Just tap the Backspace or X key and your ping alarm is immediately removed.

You can quickly change the keyboard shortcuts in Advanced Settings. To get there click the Settings icon under the time display. Then in Basic Settings click the Advanced Settings link in the upper right corner. Scroll down the Advanced Settings until you see those starting with 'Key'. Click on Key Stop Sound to edit that setting. Here is what that edit popup looks like . . .

To add the Delete key just type that key on your keyboard and click the Save button. That's it, you're done.

Web Accessible Sounds

You can customize your alarm sounds by using sound files accessible on the web. Many websites offer thousands of free sound files you can use.

Here are a couple sound files on the web that illustrate this . . .

Bongo Drums
https://sv7x.com/bongo-drums.mp3

Buenos Aires
https://sv7x.com/buenos-aires.mp3

You can paste either link in the alarm field of the Alarms Schedule.

Note: External audio files vary in performance depending on how they are encoded and hosted. Some may include silence at the start or end, or load slightly slower on first use, especially longer files. Most web sound file links will work, but some sites block their files from being played on other websites. If your sound doesn't play, check that the link points directly to an audio file (ending in .mp3, .wav, or .ogg) rather than to a web page, and that it starts with https:// — links starting with http:// are blocked by browsers for security reasons.

Built-in Timer123 sounds are optimized for instant playback and seamless looping, with no gaps between cycles.

Extended Play Alarm

Sometimes you want a tune or song to play for a period of time, like clean-up time in grade school, or during a workout. Most of our sounds are designed to be looped, giving you flexibility with your alarms.

If you enter 'loop' for the number of times to repeat an alarm sound, then the alarm sound or tune will continue to play until the next alarm time, or until you turn it off by clicking the icon under the time display.

Customization

There are 50 settings you can set in the Basic and Advanced settings area. You can then save a link to your configured alarm clock to come right back to it later. Some great customization features include turning off the title and tagline, making the time display larger larger, using alarm colors you like, and the most powerful feature is replacing the background with an image.

Our Steampunk Alarm Clock is an example of what's possible . . .

https://timer123.com/steampunk-alarm-clock.html

Save and Reuse Your Alarm Clock Setup

Our alarm clocks allow you to save a link that has your configuration in the link. You can then share that link with others and when they click on it they will see and experience our alarm clock the way that you set it up. This makes it easy to reuse setups for recurring schedules or to share exact configurations with others.

View Your Settings Changes

You can instantly see what alarm clock settings you've adjusted by clicking on the share alarm clock icon under the time display. When you click this you are presented with a popup that lists the settings you adjusted.

Ping Me Alarm

What's this? An instant way for you to have the alarm clock ping you in 5, 10, or 37 minutes.

We made this super easy so you can create a Ping Me alarm at any time during your day with a couple keystrokes or mouseclicks.

Everyone has a plan for their day and our alarm clocks helps with that, but they also can help with mini reminders for . . .

in 5 minutes→check oven
in 12 minutes→leave for meeting
in 45 minutes→take break
in 90 minutes→follow up on email
in 7 minutes→check upload
in 2 hours→wrap up task

We call these ping alarms. Once it rings, it is removed. The alarm clock's alarm schedule has priority, but these make your day more productive as something comes up and you need a reminder to deal with it in 20 minutes. You don't want to get out your phone, open an app, type in a time, you just want to be pinged in 20 minutes. All you have to do is type 20 and the ping alarm is set, and shown under the time display. 15 Minutes later if you want to kill the ping alarm, just type an x, a backspace, or click the icon and the ping alarm is gone. Need ping to be moved out to 30 minutes from now, just type 30. Done.

There is only one ping alarm at a time, if you set a new one, it replaces the current one. The Ping can only be in the next 24 hours.

You can set a ping alarm by clicking the icon and selecting a time or typing in 7m 1h 3:35 or 8pm.

And even faster way is to just type. The alarm clock listens to the keyboard and after a second it tries to understand your ping request and immediately posts it for you

When typing you don't even need to add the m when you want a ping 1-99 minutes from now, just type the number and you're done. Need to leave in 45 minutes, type 45, done. Need to leave at 9:30, type in 930, done.

When a ping request is understood, the alarm clock plays a subtle tick sound to give you audible confirmation, and the ping alarm time is shown under the time display.

The ping alarm is set to the Bell played three times at 80% volume. You can change all this in advanced settings. You can even set it to play a sound file accessible on the web.

Thank you for using our alarm clocks. Try the above tips with one of them: