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Dear Aunt TUAW: How do I silence my iPhone?

by Erica Sadun Jan 13th 2012 at 1:00PM

Dear Aunt TUAW,

There is an article in the WSJ about how an iPhone disrupted a performance of the New York Philharmonic. I have experienced the same problem where it is impossible to turn the alarm off once it goes on.

If you set up a calendar alert and change your reminder sounds with the Alarm sound, when the alarm goes off there is no way to silence it. If you turn the phone to silence mode, it still makes noise. If you close the event, it still makes noise. I believe the only way to shut off the sound is to completely turn off the device.

This has been so annoying that I stopped using iPhone's calendar reminder alerts. This article reminded me of the problem. Can you explain how this all works?

Your loving nephew,

Brian

Dear Brian,

iPhone alarms aren't affected by any of the normal system volume settings. This ensures that you'll still be woken up in the morning, a major design touch point for iPhone users who'd prefer to get to work on time. In fact, the iPhone supports numerous independent volume controls.

For example, the mute toggle on the side of the phone controls the ringer without affecting audio playback. The iPod functions built into the unit have independent speaker and headphone levels. Siri audio has its own volume levels as well -- plus lowering Siri speaker audio doesn't change the volume for when you pick up the phone to your ear.

Apple designed these multiple controls to work in the most flexible yet reliable ways possible, ensuring that the phone responds as the user expects it to. A single system-wide volume setting wouldn't be able to handle these day-to-day nuances.

If you mute your phone for the movie theater at night, you should still be able to wake up the next morning. If you lower the speaker volume for your music, it shouldn't keep you from using Siri to call hands-free. Please note that adding headphones does not re-route alarm audio.

That means if you take your phone into a quiet event -- a meeting, concert, or other -- you should probably power off the device completely for the duration. Press the sleep/wake button for about 5 seconds, and then slide to power down.

If this is not possible, you'll want to set the ringer to mute, set the system audio to zero, launch Siri and lower the volume to zero, disable all alarms, and review the Settings > Notifications items in the Notification Center to switch off audio. There's probably some items Auntie is missing here, but she trusts her nieces and nephews will refine this list in the comments.

In the end, Auntie thinks Apple did a great job in designing the various iPhone audio systems. For those rare occasions where you really need to bypass these design choices, powering the iPhone down will keep it from embarrassing faux pas.

Hugs,

Auntie T.



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20 Comments

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Kranbollin

I turn off the ringer for meetings and such and then, being of a certain age, I always forget to turn it back on. It would be nice if I could turn off the noises for a preset period. I understand that Android phones have this capability.

January 15 2012 at 10:40 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Briana

...so I would need to mess with 5 different settings just to mute my phone. Wow. I was looking forward to getting an iPhone when my phone's eligible for an upgrade in a couple months, but that might be a deal-breaker.

January 14 2012 at 1:00 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Briana's comment
KG

Generally, you just have to toggle the little button on the side of the phone to mute or unmute it. It's only when you get into alarms that you have to do different things. It's rarely an issue for me, but maybe it would be more of an issue for you. Personally, I find it this phone the easiest to mute of any phone I've ever had (except when it comes to alarms - that's a different story).

January 16 2012 at 9:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
awesomater

What would be great would be if the phone could have, I don't know, some sort of profile concept whereby we could save a collection of these settings and call them something like say 'Meeting' or 'Outdoors' and then simply switch between them easily, maybe a quick press of the power switch and select one. That would be awesome. Oh wait, my Nokia did this 10 years ago!!!

January 13 2012 at 9:00 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ron

Sorry, I completely disagree on this one. Mute should mean mute. Period. Apple needs to quit treating people like little kids that need to be looked after. When I mute my phone I don't want it to make any sound. If they are so worried about this, then make it a settings option "Mute mutes all sounds."

January 13 2012 at 8:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
xian

How about this for a solution... when you flip the mute switch on, the screen briefly shows a "Slide to mute all sounds..." slider, and then if you slide that it has options to set the length of time until mute returns to it's normal functionality.

Alternatively, or additionally, there could be a warning about upcoming alarms when you mute.

January 13 2012 at 5:41 PM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply
jsimonson

It amazed me that Apple didn't include a silent ringtone for just such an occasion. I made one. Y'all can grab it from here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2244889/Silent%20Ring.m4r

January 13 2012 at 4:22 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Nutmac

Plugin the earphones.

January 13 2012 at 2:29 PM Report abuse -1 rate up rate down Reply
xxp84

The Alarm logic should be smarter. Since basically everyone charges their phone at night, a good compromise should be that when the mute switch is on, Calendar alerts and Clock alarms don't sound out loud, only vibrate, UNLESS the AC power is connected. Since charging is almost always not done at the symphony/work meetings/etc, this should basically protect you.

If you can't remember to turn on your ringer or plug in your phone before bed, then buy a clock radio. Otherwise your battery might die anyway and still not wake you up.

January 13 2012 at 2:22 PM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply
shadowbottle

Pressing volume up or down will immediately mute any alert/ringer/notification noises. Every time. Even in this test case scenario - I just set it up and tried it myself to make sure. Created a calendar event for five minutes into the future, set it to go off at the time of the event, and went into the Sounds setting and changed Calender Alerts to use the Alarm sound and set it down on my desk.
In fact, I used to to remind me to respond to this article with my findings (;

January 13 2012 at 2:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
horiah00

I also have an issue with my iPhone making noise at night: the only way I could find to not allow incoming emails to buzz and still allow the alarm to wake me up in the morning is if I manually switch to Airplane mode before I go to bed and then turn it off in the morning. This is driving me nuts.

Does anybody know of a better way of doing this?

January 13 2012 at 2:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to horiah00's comment
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