Miss Sleepytime? Meet its modern replacement

Updated August 2026

For over a decade, Sleepytime answered a simple wish: let the music fade away gently instead of stopping mid-song. Then it quietly went silent — the listing remains, but development ended in 2020. If you loved that gentle fade, Sleep Timer rebuilds it natively for today’s Macs and adds a widget, Siri, and a bedtime schedule.

What made Sleepytime special

Sleepytime, by indie developer Michaël Fortin, did one bedtime ritual beautifully. You picked a duration, pressed play, and your music faded down so slowly you never noticed the moment it ended. When the countdown finished, your Mac could go to sleep, shut down, or log out on its own. It even worked the other way around, fading music back in as a morning alarm, complete with a full-screen clock, spoken time announcements using the system voices, and snooze from an Apple Remote.

It supported the players of its era — iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, Ecoute, Pulsar — and it earned genuine affection, along with coverage in Macworld. The core idea felt obvious the first time you tried it: this is simply how a Mac should fall asleep. Abrupt silence wakes you up; a slow fade tucks you in.

Where it went

Here is the honest picture. Technically, Sleepytime can still be found in the Mac App Store at $4.99. But the app has not been updated since version 2.2.7 arrived on July 11, 2020, with a Spotify integration fix. The listing still advertises iTunes, which became the Music app back in 2019, and Rdio, a streaming service that shut down in 2015. Its system requirement still reads “macOS 10.8 or later” — a baseline from 2012 — and that final 2020 build shipped months before the first Apple Silicon Macs existed.

There was no farewell post, no discontinuation notice on the developer’s site, which itself remains frozen in the same era. The app simply stopped moving while macOS kept going. No blame attaches to any of this — a solo developer carried Sleepytime for years, and indie apps have natural lifespans. But if you are settling into bed with a Mac running Sonoma, Sequoia, or Tahoe, you are leaning on software that last saw attention six macOS releases ago.

The same gentle fade, rebuilt for today

Sleep Timer for Mac picks up exactly where that ritual left off. It lives in the menu bar, is written in native SwiftUI for macOS 14 through macOS 26, and runs on Apple Silicon and Intel alike.

Its Sleep Fade works on a different, simpler principle than Sleepytime’s player hooks: it fades the system volume. Over the last minutes of the timer — you choose one to fifteen — volume follows a quadratic curve rather than a straight line, closer to how ears actually perceive loudness, so the descent into silence feels natural instead of stepped. Because the fade happens at the system level, it works with whatever is playing on your Mac: Spotify, Apple Music, a YouTube tab, a podcast app, an audiobook.

Two optional touches round it out. The screen can dim gradually alongside the audio, a soft gamma fade that eases the room toward dark. And Apple Music can be paused at the end, so your queue is not left playing silently until morning. A minute before the end, a gentle notification offers a one-click reprieve — tap “+15 min” if you are still awake — and the finish itself is your choice: put the whole Mac to sleep, or just dim the screen and let the music play on.

What Sleepytime never had

Some of this simply was not possible in Sleepytime’s day, so it takes nothing away from the original to note what a 2026-era timer can add.

There is a desktop widget with start, +15 min, and stop actions, and on macOS 26 and later a toggle right in Control Center. Siri, Shortcuts, and Spotlight all understand “start sleep timer,” which matters when the lights are already off and you would rather speak than click. A daily bedtime schedule starts the timer for you each night — the scheduled sleep feature Apple removed from macOS, restored. The app speaks ten languages, and it makes no network connections and collects no data at all: your bedtime is nobody’s telemetry.

Moving over

Switching takes about two minutes, which feels appropriate for an app about winding down.

1. Get Sleep Timer from the Mac App Store. It is $2.99 as a one-time purchase — less than Sleepytime’s $4.99, with no subscription.
2. In Settings, set your fade length (one to fifteen minutes) and switch on the extras you want: screen dimming, Apple Music pause.
3. Start tonight’s timer from the menu bar with a preset or an exact time — or set the daily schedule once and stop thinking about it.
4. Add the widget, or just tell Siri to start the timer as you turn off the lamp.

To be clear: Sleep Timer deliberately covers the falling-asleep half of what Sleepytime did. It is not an alarm clock, and it does not try to wake you up. If you want to see how it compares with everything else in this niche, the field is surveyed in our guide to the best Mac sleep timer apps.

Sleepytime earned its cult following by respecting a small, human moment. The kindest tribute to it is not nostalgia — it is keeping that gentle fade alive on the Macs we actually use now.