How to change your iPhone alarm sound

1. 1Open the Clock app and tap the Alarm tab.
2. 2Tap Edit in the top-left, then tap the alarm you want to change.
3. 3Tap Sound.
4. 4Choose a tone. The list is split into Ringtones at the top and Songs beneath. Tap one to preview it.
5. 5Tap Back, then Save.

1. 1Follow the steps above as far as the Sound screen.
2. 2Tap Pick a Song at the top of the Songs section.
3. 3Browse or search your library and tap the track you want.
4. 4Tap Back, then Save.

Most people change their alarm sound because the old one stopped working. It usually has not: you have habituated to it. Your brain learns to categorise a familiar sound as unimportant, and filters it out during light sleep.

• Rotate sounds every few weeks rather than searching for one perfect tone.
• Prefer sounds that build gradually. A sound that starts quiet and rises wakes you with less of a jolt and is harder to sleep through than a constant tone.
• Avoid music you love. You will start to resent it, and familiar music is the easiest thing of all to sleep through.
• Avoid sounds resembling something normal in your environment. Birdsong is a poor choice if you have birds outside.

If you have already rotated sounds and still sleep through them, sound is not your problem. Habituation applies to volume as well as tone, which is why "just make it louder" stops working too. At that point the thing that changes outcomes is requiring an action rather than a tap. See our guide on alarms for heavy sleepers.

One detail catches almost everyone out: the sound belongs to that one alarm, not to alarms in general. If you have a weekday alarm and a weekend alarm, changing one leaves the other exactly as it was. There is no global alarm sound on iPhone, and no way to apply a change to all of them at once.

You can set any song in your library as an alarm sound: tap Sound, then Pick a Song. The catch is that it has to be a real file on the device, not something your phone expects to stream at the moment it rings.

A streaming-only track has nothing to play at 6am if the network is unavailable or the subscription has lapsed, and the failure is silent rather than obvious. The same applies to a song you removed from your library after setting it: the alarm keeps the reference, the file is gone, and the alarm fires with no audio.

1. 1Download the track for offline playback before you rely on it, using the download control in the Music app.
2. 2Re-check the alarm after any library cleanup, subscription change or phone restore.
3. 3If the wake-up genuinely matters, use a built-in tone. Songs are a nice touch, and they are the least reliable option on this page.

An alarm can be configured perfectly and still make no sound. There are three causes worth checking, and none of them is the sound setting itself.

The first is volume. Alarm volume follows the Ringtone and Alerts slider, which is a different control from the side buttons, and it can sit at zero while everything else on the phone sounds completely normal.

The second is Bluetooth. If the phone is still paired to headphones, a car or a speaker, the alarm plays through that device instead of the phone speaker. The alarm fired correctly; you simply were not where the sound came out.

The third is that the sound is set to None. It is an option in the list, it is easy to select by accident while scrolling, and an alarm with no sound still shows in the Clock app as having gone off.

Vibration is chosen independently of the tone, at the top of the same Sound screen, and it has its own None option. If you sleep with the phone under a pillow or on a mattress, a strong vibration pattern is often more effective than a louder tone, because the surface transmits it.

You can also create a custom pattern by tapping out a rhythm, which is genuinely useful if you share a bed and want something you will recognise and your partner will not.

The honest answer is that the specific tone matters much less than people expect, and much less than how long you have been using it. Habituation is the real variable: your brain learns any repeated signal that carries no consequence and begins filtering it out, and it does that regardless of which tone you picked.

That is also why making the alarm louder buys a few weeks at best. You habituate to loud sounds the same way you habituate to quiet ones. The volume changes how startling it is on day one, not how well it works in week six.

• Change the sound every few weeks rather than searching for a perfect one. Rotation beats selection.
• Prefer a tone that builds gradually over one that starts at full volume. Waking abruptly from deep sleep makes sleep inertia worse, not better.
• Avoid anything that resembles a normal sound in your environment. Birdsong is a poor choice if you have birds outside your window.
• If you have already rotated sounds and still sleep through them, sound is not your problem, and no tone on the list will fix it.

At that point the thing that changes outcomes is requiring an action rather than a tap, which is the entire idea behind a mission alarm.