Android customization – build a music sleep timer and music alarm clock using the Tasker Task

Last week in our Android customization series, we walked through the basics and tools needed to hook up a USB flash drive to your Android device. As a recap, you need an USB OTG capable device and connector cable, then an app, usually your favorite file manager, to connect. So much simpler than you might have thought it was.

This week, we want to look at our favorite customization app, Tasker, and use it to control our music. Perhaps down the road we will create a full music player, today all we want to create are a sleep timer that shuts down your music automatically, and another timer to fire up your music after a set amount of time, let’s call it an alarm clock.

In the end, today’s project is mostly a lesson in using Tasker’s Task Timer widget.

Before we get started


You will require Tasker for our project today. Tasker is $2.99 in the Google Play Store. Be sure to check out some of the capabilities of Tasker and a few of the other projects we’ve built with it, if you are not sure it is worth the price.

Create a music sleep timer using Tasker


This project draws upon an idea I floated a few months back, utilizing the media controls in Tasker to start and stop music playback. First things first, we’ll need to start with the Tasker Task to stop media playback. It’s pretty easy, let’s get started.