I’ll have a go with the automation as you suggest. I haven’t explored those functions yet. If it proves to do the job, it would be worth writing up in the docs for others to benefit from as well.
At first glance, it looks like I’ll have to buy Tasker and maybe an internet radio app that doesn’t use the earbud cable as an antenna. Needing Tasker (or any extra software) isn’t exactly appealing, but I’ll keep exploring for now.
A solution I found was to use a portable speaker that has volume controls with an aux cable and set the speaker to a quiet volume, make sure the speaker allows you to disable auto power off.
I need this capability, and will have to fall back to an alternate app until max volume limiting is an option.
@petr-urbandroid Of course, there are several, but they are all variations on a theme.
I currently have ten alarms set on my phone, only one of which is the alarm to get me to wake up in the morning. All the others are to remind me to do various tasks throughout the day or night.
These alarms can and do go off throughout the day, with me and the phone in various environments (busy / loud, uncrowded / quiet etc) and where I am surrounded by varying numbers of other people. I am not always right next to my phone when the alarm goes off and until I get back to it I don’t want to deafen anyone else in the vicinity. Also I don’t want to come back to a phone that has the volume cranked up to 11. The max volume for me therefore needs to be alarm specific.
Honestly I can’t see why limiting the max alarm volume would not be a feature. Added as an option users could still keep current functionality if required.
Hello @bob1, many thanks for the explanation. The reason why this is not the option is - major use-case for the app is to make sure apps get woken app in the morning and do not oversleep with the CAPTCHA feature and backup alarm.
When we had this feature we had several reports weekly from angry people why complained they missed work or some important meeting and than we found out the cause was actually the alarm was not loud enough…
I think we could consider something like allowing max 100%, 90% or 80% volume but not below as going below leads to angry people not being woken up. Our primary aim is to make sure your alarm clock always wakes you…so what is the logical next step when you are not reacting on an alarm at 80% volume? IMHO it is to increase the volume to 90%…
I think reminders is not the core business of our app as there are more suitable apps for that, like the Calendar app etc…
Still I believe your use-case can be perfectly addressed in the current settings.
Either you can use a long gentle volume increase period so that there is enough time to notice the alarm without it gets to any unpleasant volumes… this can be set up to 24 minutes.
you can also have a special ringtone - e.g. an mp3 file which has a volume limit cap already in it… so just set that ringtone for your daily reminders and use a different one for the morning alarm…
What do you think?
Many thanks for your detailed reply @petr-urbandroid, very much appreciated.
I fully understand now that the core feature of your app is to wake people up. I do think though that if people have complained to you that they did not have their volume level set sufficiently high says more about the individual than your app!
I think that if a configurable max were to be provided it should be settable to any value. Any arbitrary set of levels would not completely address my use case I feel, nor allow the flexibility I am after. Again, I fully understand if my requirements and the point of the app are not the same.
It would be a shame I think to not include this feature, as in my experience, not only are Calendar apps unsuitable for this purpose, most of the many alarm apps I have come across fall short in one way or another. It’s ironic then that one of the best alarms is to be found in an app with such a specific focus.
Maybe you’d be interested in producing a non-sleep tracking app with just alarms. I’m guessing that wouldn’t be too much work for you, and I’d certainly consider paying for that 
Thanks also for the ideas to address my issue, I may give them a try, although initial thoughts are:
A long fade in time might mean that I don’t notice the alarm until too much time has passed.
Interesting, but maybe awkward to get ‘just right’ in practice. Not sure how I’d do that - use something like Audacity perhaps?
Again, thanks for your consideration. The app (in terms of alarms, I don’t use sleep tracking) is great.
@bob1 many thanks for the further details. We will reopen this for another internal discussion, but I do not think we can really make this completely optional I can image something like 50%-100%
yes, I guess that is the down side, but with the max volume option in place - what if you set the maximum volume too low so that you don’t notice the alarms? I guess in this case volume increase over the limit would come in handy?
It may be awkward but we are talking here about a potentially dangerous definitely not recommended option… implementation is IMHO quite simple… exactly as you say open any sound file in Audacity, use Effect > Amplify > -30 dB or other > export > use in Sleep as Android as the ringtone
BTW there is an menu > home screen > alarms only mode in the app…
@bob1 fogot to mention a third option
@petr-urbandroid Your point 3. is interesting. If I understand it correctly, the alarm won’t fade in, it will start at the current device volume level and stay at the same level.
Assuming this is correct, is there not already a risk of a user selecting this option, not setting their device volume high enough, and then oversleeping?
As I see it I can either choose to have the alarm go off at a static volume level (that set at the phone level) or an alarm that fades in all the way to max alarm level (regardless of current phone volume level).
If that is correct then I can’t really see the arguments against allowing an option to fade in to a lower than maximum alarm level. Please feel free to correct me if wrong. I don’t want to sound awkward, I’m really trying to understand here.
If you don’t like the idea of allowing an optional volume limit, perhaps adding an option to max out the fade in alarm at the current device level?
@bob1 yes you are right this option is already risky and wast majority of all “alarm did not ring” reports can be accounted to that option.
On the other hand this is how typical alarm clock behaves so the option is also pretty intuitive as well… if you choose the alarm to respect your device volume level and you are not woken up you may first check the system alarm volume before contacting the support.
In addition this option has a safety limit, so if volume is set too low we will increase it to make it hearable…
Implementing a gradual volume increase with the option 3) would be IMHO an option how to address this. One issue I see with it is you could not control duration of the increase - as this would make settings too complicated IMHO… so we could use something like a one minute default for that option.
Hello @bob1 … I have implemented your suggestion for the next BETA version of the app. If you choose Gentle volume increase: Disabled (Use current device volume), there is a quick volume increase episode at the beginning of the alarm - this only affects the playback volume but the system wide alarm volume remains intact… For that BETA I have set the episode to conservatively 30 seconds as this isn’t configurable and conservatively we would not like to delay alarms for some use-cases…
Hope that helps…
@bob1 many thanks…
If you are not already in BETA, please first join our BETA Testers group at:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#feature-requestsThat you can opt-into the BETA at the following address:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.urbandroid.sleep
Or simply by visiting our Play Store listing and tapping Join BETA
The update should arrive later today or tomorrow…
Hey Petr,
Wouldn’t it be an option to set a max snooze volume? So the alarm gently increases, as soon as you wake up you hit the snooze button and the volume either stays at the current level or jumps to the set snooze volume level. The music keeps playing at that level for the snooze length. Then when snooze fest is over (after 3, 5, 10 etc minutes), the volume starts rising again, until you hit snooze again (or get that lazy ass out of bed now!).
I have no idea of this is technically at all possible, but I think it solves both the ‘wanna stay in bed with music at a pleasant volume’ and the ‘Omg your stupid app made me oversleep’ problems pretty good.
What do you think?
@Regina at the moment we understand Snooze as - I want to sleep more at least for X minutes… This is why when you hit snooze we try to do maximum we can to let you sleep, turn off the alarm sound, turn off the smart light etc…
So what you are describing is some other Snooze which aim is not to let you sleep for rather make you wake - gently probably… this is what we try to do with the gentle volume increase feature in the app… so IMHO this is what you would use the long Gentle volume increase interval for?
Hello folks, we got some negative feedback on the new gentle volume increase disable feature with the 30 seconds volume ramp up from people who have issues with wake up and they want the alarm to start at full volume from the very beginning…
Hard to say how to do something which reflects all the contradicting use-cases… so what we did to gain some time and investigate this further is the following options:
A disabled option without a volume up, a 30 seconds volume up limited by the system current alarm volume, and than the gentle volume increase up to maximum options which start from 1 minute to 24 minutes as previously implemented…
This will appear in the next BETA version…
While this is a good approach, and I definitely approve, I wonder if the following might be easier to fit everyone’s needs…
Gentle Volume Increase:
Start at _____ and increase to _____ over ____ minutes and ____ seconds.
Defaults: 0, 100, 0, 30.
Hi Petr,
I see you’re point, although I wouldn’t mind falling asleep again with some soft background music.
I do understand that waking up gently is the whole point of the gentle volume increase function, but as you can see in the this topic, it isn’t working optimally since it’s gentle for a limited time and then very aggressive due to the max volume. 
Another possible solution: is it possible to actually adjust the volume with the volume buttons of the phone? Now the options are to use them to snooze or do nothing (forgot the third option). I have them doing nothing but if I could use them to decrease the volume, that would be perfect. And preferably then also stop increasing gently, otherwise I keep pressing them (although… Good captcha? :p)
@Brian_Chabot many thanks for the further feedback. In fact we already have all of that in separated options gentle volume increase + Delayed sound start… with the exception of “increase to”…
The reason for this is discussed on this forum. This option lead to people oversleeping, simply because they set their max too low. This is why we want to limit this and by default always increase up to max volume to make sure people wake up.
Also with longer increase duration IMHO it really makes sense to try a higher volume if we were not able to wake you up with the current volume over the last X minutes…
To cover also the use case discussed on this forum we added the option for a very short gentle volume increase 30s to current system volume max, but we consider this option as potentially dangerous… and recommend using the other gentle volume increase options…
