Using the iPhone or iPad sleep timer

For as long as I have used an iPod, and now iOS, there has been a feature built into it called the sleep timer. However even though it is a really useful feature it has always been underused because it is often hidden and people don't know about it. My brother in law who uses it frequently suggested that I do a post on it. It is one if those things that I, in my little tech world, took it for granted that other people knew how to do.

The concept: is actually really simple. The idea has always been the you want to listen to music, but you may only want to listen to music for a set amount of time and then you would like it to stop.
This may be for a number of reasons, but the most common one is probably that you listen to music while falling asleep and you don't want the music to keep playing all night, that would just be ridiculous.

So you could create a playlist that just happens to be the length of time it normally takes you to fall asleep, then you could give in a cool name like "lullabies" or "sounds of the night." Or, you could just use the sleep timer, then you could listen to whatever you wanted or put the whole thing on shuffle.
Counter to what you may think, however, the sleep timer is not in the iOS music app. It is, in fact found in the clock app under timer(red arrow), and then under sounds or When Timer Ends (orange arrow) all the way at the bottom the option listed as "stop playing" (yellow arrow).

This picture shows both an iPad on iOS 6 and an iPhone on iOS 7

While it may seem odd that this is not found in the music app, there is a good reason; by being in the timer app it can stop anything that is playing, not just music. This will allow you to use the sleep timer with podcasts, iTunes U lectures, white noise applications, audiobooks, etc.
Now in order to use the sleep timer just:

1. set it to the appropriate time, say 30 minutes
2. select "stop playing" as the sound
3. turn on your audio
4. go to sleep

Sweet dreams.

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