How individual snore sounds become the episodes you review each morning.
A night of snoring can contain hundreds of individual sounds. Listing each one would bury you in detail, so Snore Timeline organizes them into a hierarchy: single sounds become signals, and signals that happen close together become episodes. Once you understand the two layers and the one rule that separates them, every count and summary in the app reads at a glance.
Every time Snore Timeline hears a snoring sound, it counts one snoring signal. A signal is the smallest unit the app tracks: one detected snore. More signals mean more snoring activity.
An episode is a group of signals that happen close together in time. Signals are the building blocks; episodes are the stories they tell. A stretch of on-and-off snoring around 2 AM shows up as one episode containing dozens of signals, which tells you both how long the activity lasted and how dense it was.
You see both layers during the night, too. 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. These give you a quick sense of activity at a glance; the full breakdown waits in the app the next morning. See Live Activity for how to set it up.
One rule controls everything: 30 seconds of silence ends an episode. When the app detects snoring, it opens an episode and keeps adding signals as long as snoring continues. If no snoring is detected for 30 full seconds, the episode closes. The next signal after that opens a new one.
The gap between sounds, not the total length, separates one episode from the next. That answers a common question: why do two snores 20 seconds apart count as the same episode? Because 20 seconds falls inside the 30-second window. The quiet stretch has to reach 30 seconds before the app closes the episode. This keeps a single bout of stop-and-start snoring as one episode instead of splitting it into many tiny ones.
Quiet moments inside an episode don't disappear either. Within an episode, a quiet stretch longer than 10 seconds is tracked as a significant gap, so you can see pauses in the activity without the episode breaking apart.
A significant gap is not the same thing as a breathing disruption. A disruption is flagged only when audible breathing in the prior minute gives way to 10 or more seconds of complete silence, broken by a snoring signal. Breathing Disruptions explains the full set of conditions.
Open any episode and you get a complete picture of what happened during that stretch:
Volume readings use dB SPL, and the app measures up to 105 dB. Read it like a volume meter: higher numbers mean louder sounds. The app tracks both peak and average levels for each episode, which matters because a long episode with one loud burst tells a different story than a short episode that stayed loud throughout. How Detection Works covers the decibel scale in depth.
Episodes also connect to the audio itself. Tap any episode on the timeline to play back that portion of your recording, with audio enhancement to make sleep sounds easier to hear. Timeline & Playback shows you how.
The plain-English summary on each episode comes from three characteristics the app measures, so you can decode any description once you know the vocabulary.
Volume bands turn decibel levels into words:
Rhythm patterns describe the spacing between signals:
Trends capture direction: whether the snoring grew louder, faded, or stayed stable over the course of the episode.
Put together, a summary like "Heavy snoring for over 20 minutes" means the episode's volume landed in the 56+ dB band and ran past the 20-minute mark. The words map back to numbers you can verify in the episode's own metrics.
Snoring isn't the only sound the app classifies, and episodes carry a type label so you can scan the night at a glance and jump straight to the parts you want to review. There are four types:
An episode that ended up with no classified sounds shows as a quiet period.
Within respiratory episodes, gasps and coughs get their own separate counts alongside the main snoring count, so you can see what made up each episode rather than one undifferentiated total. How Detection Works describes how the classifier tells these sounds apart.
If you see more Loud Sound labels than you expect, your room is the usual cause. Background noise can mask the breathing patterns the snoring classifier listens for, and when a room sits above about 45 dB at baseline, more sounds land as Loud Sound signals instead of snoring episodes. Reducing noise sources like fans, white noise machines, HVAC, and a TV left playing helps the app classify snoring with more accuracy. Background noise covers what to quiet first.
Wondering 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, and gasps and coughs appear as separate counts alongside the snoring count.
One boundary to keep in mind: Snore Timeline analyzes audio only. Episode counts and event labels are for your own insight or for discussing with a doctor, and the app does not diagnose sleep apnea or any medical condition.
