How to: Wake Up to the Radio Using Awaken

I always used my alarm clock to wake up to my local NPR affiliate (MPBN). That is, until reception became so terrible that I was waking up to a loud blast of static. Enter Awaken, a Mac app that allows the setting up of various alarms (it’s very robust; I’m summarizing). Awaken allowed me to pick a song or playlist in iTunes to wake up to, but wouldn’t let me pick a radio station, even one loaded in iTunes. Frustrating! As fun as it was to wake up to my music, what I really wanted was The News. My solution? With luck, MPBN has streaming available online in a number of formats, including a .pls file (the file that iTunes uses to load the stream).

I right-clicked this option, saved the file (mpbn.pls) to a folder, edited my “wake up” alarm in Awaken to launch a file instead of playing music in iTunes, and selected mbpn.pls.

I haven’t tested it out yet, but see no reason why it won’t work, and am looking forward to rousing myself from bed with horrible information about the state of the world today.