Pick a quality tier, cap your storage, and keep months of history on one phone.
An all-night recording is one long audio file, and night after night those files add up. Snore Timeline gives you three levers to control how much space they take: the recording quality you pick in Settings, a Storage Limit that clears old nights for you, and Episode-Only Storage that drops the silence between events. This page explains how each lever works, what it costs you in playback detail, and what to do when your phone runs short of room. Every recording stays on your device; see the Privacy Policy for the full picture.
Open Settings and choose one of three recording quality levels. Each option lists its frequency range and an estimated file size, so you can weigh the trade-off before bed. The tiers differ in how much of the sound spectrum the saved file keeps: a wider range means richer playback and bigger files.
How to choose: if snoring is your focus, Basic captures the relevant sounds while keeping files small. Step up to Standard or High Fidelity when you want clearer playback of speech or fine detail.
Does a lower tier hurt detection? No. Snore detection works at all three quality levels, and choosing a lower quality does not reduce detection accuracy. The quality setting decides how much detail the saved file keeps for playback, while detection runs in real time as the sound arrives. The trade-off shows up when you listen back, not in what the app catches.
Why did last night sound quieter? On Basic, the compression that shrinks the file also mutes detail in softer sounds, so quiet snores can come out muffled. Switching to Standard or High Fidelity captures more clarity. Microphone distance matters too: the farther your phone sits from you, the fainter the recording. Keep it about 1 to 2 feet away with the microphone unobstructed, and try audio enhancement when you play a night back.
What does a full night cost? A typical 8-hour night ranges from roughly 64 MB on Basic to about 200 MB on High Fidelity, scaling with how long you record. The two features below keep that total in check over the long run.
The Storage Limit puts a hard cap on how much space your recordings can occupy. Turn it on in Settings and pick a limit of 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, or 8 GB. Once total usage passes that limit, the app deletes your oldest nights until you are back under it, oldest first, so your recent history always wins. The app shows roughly how much each cap holds at high quality: about 3 to 5 days at 1 GB, 1 to 2 weeks at 2 GB, 2 to 3 weeks at 4 GB, and 4 to 6 weeks at 8 GB.
A usage bar in Settings shows your current size against the limit. Cleanup runs in the background after a recording stops, with progress messages like "Freeing up X MB" followed by "Freed X MB" so you can watch what gets removed.
The Keep History toggle controls what cleanup removes:
There is also a reverse cleanup mode that keeps your full audio recordings and instead removes the oldest episodes and analysis, in case audio matters more to you than history.
Will the app delete recordings without asking? Only if you turn the Storage Limit on. With it off, nothing is removed on its own; your recordings stay until you delete them yourself. Episode-Only Storage, covered next, also trims audio on its own when enabled, but it preserves all of your episode data.
If you plan to share specific nights, export the audio before cleanup reaches them. Once the Storage Limit removes a night's audio, only the episode data remains for that night.
Most of an overnight recording captures a quiet room. The moments you replay are the episodes: stretches of snoring, sleep talking, and other detected events. Episode-Only Storage acts on that insight. After each session ends, it removes the silent portions of the recording and keeps only the segments that contain detected episodes. That cuts storage use by a wide margin while preserving all of your episode data.
Turn it on in Settings and it runs after every night without further input. You can also trim a single past night by hand: in Settings, choose the night and tap the option to trim that night's recordings down to the episode segments.
Because the trim happens after the session, the app has already analyzed the full night before anything is removed. Your timeline, episode counts, and sleep analysis come out the same; you lose only the ability to play back the silence between events.
When your usage passes the limit you set, Settings shows an "Over Limit - Tap to Clean Up" button. Tap it to start cleanup on the spot instead of waiting for the automatic background pass. The app shows "Freeing up X MB" and then "Freed X MB" as it works, and it follows your Keep History setting: it either strips audio from the oldest nights or removes those nights entirely, oldest first, until you are back under the limit.
Beyond the cleanup button, you have four ways to reclaim space:
Freeing up general storage on your iPhone helps too, since the app shares space with everything else on the device.
The app enforces two thresholds so a recording never starts on a phone that cannot hold it:
If space runs out in the middle of a session, the recording stops on its own and the app shows "Storage full - recording stopped." Everything captured up to that point follows the rules above. If device storage gets critically low, Snore Timeline falls back to in-memory operation to help prevent data loss.
A Storage Limit with Keep History on, plus Episode-Only Storage, keeps most phones clear of these thresholds for good. If recordings keep hitting the storage wall, Troubleshooting walks through the fix step by step.
