With its diversity of music apps, the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch are perfect for owners who like to unwind at night and listen to some music as they fall asleep. Though relaxing, listening while sleepy has its detractors. If you are not careful, you may often find yourself waking up in the middle of the night with music blaring in your ears and almost dead battery. You can avoid this ear strain and battery drain by using the useful timer feature in iOS to turn off your tunes shortly after you fall asleep.

This sleep timer is available on all iOS devices and is built into the Clock app, not the Music app as you would expect. The Clock app has a “When Timer Ends” option that allows you to perform an operation, such as sound an alert, when the timer when the timer has expired. In this case, we are going to use the command “Stop Playing” to shut off the music. In iOS 8, this feature not only works with Apple Music, Beats 1 and other music being played by iOS’ built-in music app. It also works for Spotify, Rdio and many other third-party music apps.

Using the steps below, you can set your music to shut off after a pre-determined amount of time. I usually choose 30 minutes, giving me plenty of time to listen and fall asleep without draining my battery with unattended, overnight listening.

1. Start playing the radio station or playlist that you want to listen to while you are falling asleep.
2. Open the Clock app.
3. Select the “Timer” tab.
4. Create a new timer by choosing the amount of time you want your music to play.
5. Tap the “When Timer Ends” option.
6. Scroll to the bottom and select “Stop Playing.”
7. Tap “Set” to confirm the timer settings and then “Start” to begin the timer.
8. Lay down, close your eyes and enjoy your music.

With the timer running in the background, you can fall asleep with the assurance that your music will shut off shortly after your shut eye begins.

Sometimes apps go awry and become unresponsive, making it difficult to do anything in the app and sometimes even impossible to leave the app. If you find yourself stuck inside one of these frozen apps, no worries as the iPhone, iPad and the Apple Watch allow you to force close an app that has locked up. Read on to find out how this force close procedure works.

iPhone, iPad and upper Touch

Force closing an unresponsive iOS app is simple — just double-click on the home button to display a carousel of all the open applications that are running on your device. You can force close them by swiping up on them and pushing them off the screen in iOS 7 and iOS 8. If you are running an older version of iOS, the procedure is similar.Simply double tap the home button to display a series of icons that represent your open applications and then tap-hold on those icons until they start jiggling. Use the minus sign in the corner to force close the app.

If you are stuck inside an app and the home button is unresponsive, you can use these steps to force close the app and restore your phone to normal operations.

Press and hold the power button on your iOS device until the “Slide to Power Off” notification appears.
When the power off slider appears, you can release the power button and then immediately press and hold the home button.
Continue holding the home button for several seconds while iOS works to force close the app.

If you have followed the steps correctly, iOS should force close the app and bring you back to the home screen.

Apple Watch

Even Apple Watch apps lock up sometimes, leaving you stranded in the app without any way of exiting back to the home screen or your Glances. If you need to force close you app, you’ll have to press the side button on the Apple Watch and hold it until the shut down option appears. Then release the side button and press it again to force quit the app you last had open.