We’re getting more technical support issues with P.A.C than we normally do which is probably a combination of it being slightly more complex than most of our our other Apps and issues with power handling in OS 3.0. Anyway, here’s a quick roundup of the most common issues.

Playlist Alarm Clock FAQs
Volume control
In order to automatically fade the volume down, P.A.C has to take control. This means that you can’t manually adjust the volume while P.A.C is playing. This one falls into the category of ‘it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!’ but we understand that lots of you want to listen to loud music quietly at night so as of version 1.1, we’ve added separate volume controls for both Sleep & Wake.
Alarm doesn’t go off
As of version 1.4 we think we’ve resolved all the issues with the alarm not sounding in the morning. Now as long as the app is running the alarm should go off regardless of whether the phone is on charge or not and the screen can be on, dim or off. If the screen is off please be aware that the snooze function won’t work as intended – you’ll have to unlock the screen first and then press snooze – sorry, that’s just the way it is.
The screen doesn’t stay on
Some people are reporting that the screen turns itself off even if the phone is on charge. This seems to be related to a ‘bug’ in OS 3.0 that cause the phone to ‘forget’ that it’s meant to be keeping the screen on when a song starts playing. If this happens, try turning the screen back on and it should stay on. We’re pretty confident that we’ve found a workaround to this in the next version (1.3) which will be out shortly…
Managing and editing playlists
Apple seem to give us the capability to create playlists but not edit them directly. We’re looking into a workaround at the moment but in the meantime it’s easier to create a couple of playlists in iTunes and sync them to your phone. Edit them in iTunes and import them into P.A.C using the ‘Add All Songs’ option when you choose your songs.
P.A.C doesn’t have direct access to the playlists on your iPod. When you add songs they are added to P.A.C’s internal playlist but not linked directly to the song as they would be in your iPod eg. if you delete a song in iTunes it will be removed from your iPhone and won’t show up in any of your playlists but it will still be in P.A.C’s internal playlist and this can cause problems.
Because of this, editing the contents of a playlist in iTunes will not automatically update P.A.C’s playlist.
Freezing at startup
Related to the above point. If you remove some of the songs that are in P.A.C’s playlist from your iPhone (or if they’re in a smart playlist and get removed automatically) then P.A.C wont be able to find them at startup and this might cause it to freeze. If this happens and you know that you’ve removed certain songs, putting them back on the iPhone should help. If not or you can’t remember which songs they were, try deleting P.A.C and re-installing it. This will also delete it’s internal playlists.
Large playlists cause slowdown
Some people are adding hundreds of songs to a playlist and finding that this slows the App down. This is because P.A.C can’t access the playlist directly so has to make a copy of it to use internally – the more songs the longer it takes to copy and display etc… The solution to this one is simple – use fewer songs in your playlist. You don’t really need 100s of songs to drift off to sleep to after all… and the more songs you have in your playlist the more chance there is that some of them won’t be there when P.A.C tries to find them.
Podcasts
When Apple bought out OS 3.1 they changed something in the background and P.A.C can no longer find podcasts. We’re looking into this and hope it’s something we can fix rather than waiting for OS 3.2.
Crashing when you try to set up the Wake playlist
Some users were experiencing a crash when they clicked on the wake window to set up Wake playlists. The issue seemed to be linked to the region format on their iPhones – Setting General > International > Region Format to United Kingdom solved the problem and they were able to switch back to their chosen region without any further issues. If you’re experiencing the same problem anywhere else in the world, please let us know.
Any other issues that you want to let us know about?