How individual snore sounds become the episodes you review each morning.
A night of snoring can contain hundreds of individual sounds. Listing every one of them would bury you, so Snore Timeline organizes them into two layers. A single sound is a signal. Signals that happen close together make up an episode. Once you know the two layers and the one rule that separates them, every count and summary in the app makes sense.
Every time Snore Timeline hears a snore, it counts one snoring signal. A signal is the smallest unit the app tracks, one detected snore. More signals, more snoring.
An episode is a group of signals that happened close together. A stretch of on-and-off snoring around 2 AM shows up as one episode holding dozens of signals, which tells you how long it went on and how dense it was.
You can see both layers during the night as well. While recording, the Live Activity shows two running counts, the episode count next to a waveform icon and the signal count next to a moon icon. They give you a rough sense of how the night is going. The full breakdown is in the app the next morning. See Live Activity for how to set it up.
There's one rule: 30 seconds of silence ends an episode. When the app hears snoring it opens an episode and keeps adding signals for as long as the snoring goes on. If it hears no snoring for 30 full seconds, the episode closes. The next signal after that opens a new one.
It's the gap between sounds that separates episodes, and the total length has nothing to do with it. People often ask why two snores 20 seconds apart count as the same episode. It's because 20 seconds is inside the 30-second window. The quiet has to last a full 30 seconds before the app closes the episode. That way a single bout of stop-and-start snoring stays one episode instead of being chopped into lots of tiny ones.
Quiet moments inside an episode aren't lost either. A quiet stretch longer than 10 seconds within an episode gets tracked as a significant gap, so you can see the pauses without the episode breaking apart.
A significant gap isn't the same thing as a breathing disruption. The app only flags a disruption when audible breathing in the previous minute gives way to 10 or more seconds of complete silence, and then a snoring signal breaks it. Breathing Disruptions lays out the full set of conditions.
Open any episode and you get the full picture of that stretch:
Snoring episodes longer than about five minutes swap the small waveform strip for a rate chart. It's a line tracing snores per minute across the episode, with the busiest and quietest minutes labeled, and any breathing disruptions drawn as shaded bands at their real position and width. Tap anywhere on the chart to start playback from that moment, and a playhead follows the line while the audio plays. Instead of "this episode was bad" you get "it peaked at 37 snores a minute, right before that disruption".
Volume readings are in dB SPL, and the app measures up to 105 dB. Read it like a volume meter. Each episode gets both a peak and an average, and that matters, because a long episode with one loud burst is a different thing from a short one that stayed loud the whole way through. How Detection Works covers the decibel scale.
Episodes are tied to the audio too. Tap any episode on the timeline to play that part of your recording, with audio enhancement so the sleep sounds are easier to hear. Timeline & Playback shows how.
The plain-English summary on each episode is built from three things the app measures. Once you know the vocabulary, you can decode any description.
Volume bands turn decibel levels into words:
Rhythm patterns describe the spacing between signals:
Trends give the direction, whether the snoring got louder, faded, or held steady over the episode.
So a summary like "Heavy snoring for over 20 minutes" means the episode's volume landed in the 56+ dB band and it ran past the 20-minute mark. Every word maps back to a number you can check in the episode's own metrics.
Snoring isn't the only thing the app classifies, and episodes carry a type label so you can scan the night and jump to the parts you want. There are four types:
An episode that ends up with no classified sounds in it shows as a quiet period.
Inside respiratory episodes, gasps and coughs get their own counts next to the main snoring count, so you can see what each episode was made of instead of one lumped total. How Detection Works describes how the classifier tells them apart.
If you're seeing more Loud Sound labels than you'd expect, the room is usually the reason. Background noise covers up the breathing patterns the snoring classifier relies on, and once a room sits above about 45 dB at rest, more sounds get logged as Loud Sound signals instead of snoring episodes. Cutting down on fans, white noise machines, HVAC, and a TV left playing helps the app classify snoring more accurately. Background noise covers what to quiet first.
Want to know how many times you snored last night? Open that night and check the per-night totals and the episode list. Each episode shows its own signal count, with gasps and coughs counted separately next to the snoring.
One thing to keep in mind. Snore Timeline only analyzes audio. Episode counts and event labels are for your own insight, or for bringing to a doctor, and the app doesn't diagnose sleep apnea or any other condition.
