I love the smell of Pandora in the morning

If you are like me, you use your phone as an alarm clock. It’s convenient because no matter where you are, it’s always with you…ready to yank you from your sweet slumber. Today I’ll show you how to make a very basic alarm clock for Android using Pandora and Tasker. It is, in my humble opinion, absolutely the best way to wake up in the morning. Ok, fine, the smell of bacon and eggs would be better. So if anyone can figure out a way to rig up an alarm clock that starts making you breakfast, please contact me right away!

Read on for all the dirty details…

THE PROBLEM
Normally a cell phone alarm clock will wake you up with some horrendously annoying sound. Yes, true, most phones will let you pick a music ring tone or even an mp3 to wake up to. But that simply ruins whatever song you pick. No matter what song you choose, it will ever after be associated with the awful feeling of morning grogginess.

THE SOLUTION
Below I’ve listed a very basic Tasker alarm profile that will simply start your Pandora app at the designated time, and close the app when the profile exits. Remember, profile exit events are triggered when the condition is no longer true, so if you want Pandora to stop at 7:00 AM, you need to set your exit event for 6:59 AM. I then set my phones annoying “beep beep beep” alarm for 7:00 AM so that in case I sleep heavily on a particular morning, I will still be forced out of bed.

Please note, due to changes in the Android platform, phones running 2.2 or higher will NOT be able to kill the Pandora app by merely performing a “Kill App” task. This profile gets around the problem by pausing the music, going to the home screen, and then killing the app. I’ve found this to be very reliable but please let me know if you have any trouble with it.

• PROFILE: Pandora Alarm

Have a better way to wake up in the morning? Tell me about it in the comments!