Every color, zoom level, and tap on the waveform, explained.
The timeline is where a night of audio turns into something you can poke around in. Once you know what the colors mean and how the zoom levels fit together, you can go from "I think I snored" to hearing the exact moment in a few seconds. This page covers reading the waveform, getting around it, and playing things back.
Snore Timeline draws your night as a waveform. Time runs left to right, and each bar's height is the peak average level for that slice of the night. A time indicator in the middle of the display shows the exact time under it and updates as you scroll, or as a recording goes on. Drag the waveform left or right to move through the night. A quick flick keeps it gliding until it slows to a stop.
The bars are colored by sound type, so you can spot what's what without playing anything:
Detected sleep stages show up as a hypnogram in your nightly summary. Tap a stage block there and the timeline jumps to that moment, which is handy for lining up snoring episodes with a particular stage. On nights where a wearable synced sleep data but you didn't record any audio, the otherwise empty waveform draws a stage ribbon in the hypnogram colors, and the status bar reads out the stage and your vitals under the center line, something like "Light · 57 bpm · 13 br/min · SpO2 96%".
The shades of orange mean something too. The orange bars stack into shades that show how a sound's energy is spread across frequencies. Darker orange is the low end, roughly 50 to 250 Hz, the deep rumble of snoring. Medium orange is the mids, about 250 to 1500 Hz, where harmonics and vowel sounds sit. Bright orange is the highs, about 1500 to 8000 Hz, sibilants like the "s" in "sss". You get this detail on the 1-second bars, one step out from the real-time view. At wider zoom levels the bars are solid. How Detection Works explains the frequency colors, and as with everything here, it's for your own insight and isn't a medical reading.
If the timeline text is too small, the app supports Dynamic Type. Turn up your text size in iPhone Settings under Accessibility, Display & Text Size, Larger Text, and the app's labels scale with it.
Zoom all the way in and the bars go away. The real-time view traces sound as one continuous shape, fine enough that you can watch a single snore rise and fall. It's the view the app opens the moment you start a recording.
The dashed line is your room's noise floor. Each night the app measures the quiet baseline of wherever you're sleeping, and the wave grows out from that line instead of from zero. That's why quiet breathing stays visible in a silent bedroom and in a room with a fan running. The baseline moves with the room.
Brightness tells you how much sound carried. Each swell has a translucent outer shape and a denser bright center. The outer shape traces the peak, and the bright center shows how much of that slice held sound. A swell that barely brightens was a flicker of noise. The full ones are a snore, a voice, or movement, and those are the ones worth playing.
Color names the signal. Every colored swell is a signal the app counted, the same signals your nightly summary adds up. Rose is snoring, cream is sleep talking, pale purple is a breathing disruption, cyan is a gasp, green is a cough. Apricot is a sound the app counted but couldn't name, like a door or a car going past.
That last case is the reason to scrub through this view. The wave brightens the instant a sound starts, about a second before a snoring or sleep-talking label can appear, so a bright apricot swell often means the app heard something it couldn't put a name to. Play those and you'll find the surprises. The decibel reading under the wave is just as fine-grained at this zoom. It reports the level at that exact instant instead of a window average, and refreshes eight times a second while you scrub.
While a recording is running, the wave grows to the right and stops at the center line. Nothing gets drawn ahead of it. What you see is what the microphone has already captured.
There are six zoom levels. The closest is the real-time view, which draws a continuous wave instead of bars. Outside it are five levels of bars, from most detailed to widest: 1-second, 5-second, 1-minute, 10-minute, and 1-hour. The 1-second bars show individual sounds, and the 1-hour view fits the whole night on screen. The plus and minus magnifying-glass buttons in the top-right corner of the timeline move one level in or out per tap.
Hold a zoom button for about a third of a second and it jumps all the way to the closest or widest view in that direction, so you don't have to tap through every level.
The app also changes zoom and scrolling on its own in a few situations. Knowing the rules saves some confusion:
To stop the auto-scrolling, scroll backward. The moment you move toward earlier audio the timeline freezes and stays where you put it so you can browse. Scroll back past the oldest data that's loaded and the app fetches the previous stretch in the background, keeping the time you were looking at centered. You can change the zoom yourself at any point with the magnifying-glass buttons.
To get to a specific time, drag the waveform until that time sits under the center indicator. To get to a specific episode, long-press the waveform and the app jumps to the nearest one and scrolls the episode list to match.
You don't need to scrub the whole night to find the loud parts. Open the episode list, which jumps straight to detected episodes, then tap one to see its details and play it. Each episode shows its volume in dB, so scan the list for the biggest numbers. Sounds are measured in dB SPL up to a maximum of 105 dB. Episodes & Events explains everything on an episode card.
Tap the date label above the waveform to open the calendar. It shows the current month and the ones before it. Swipe left or right to move between them. Future dates are grayed out, and the right arrow goes inactive once you reach the current month, since there's nothing past it to show.
Nights with data carry up to two small dots. A rose dot means recorded audio, a mint dot means synced watch sleep data, so you can tell recording-only, watch-only, and both apart. Tap any past date with data and the timeline jumps to 10 PM that night, which is a reasonable place to start for an evening recording. Tapping today's date jumps to the current time instead, since tonight hasn't happened yet.
For neighboring nights you can skip the calendar. Swipe left or right on the Nightly Summary screen to move between nights, and do the same on the Weekly Summary screen to move between weeks.
The strip below the waveform tells you what the timeline is doing at that moment:
Changing zoom also flashes a small label naming the new time scale, from the real-time view at the closest zoom out to 1-hour bars at the widest, so you always know what you're looking at.
Decibel readings here, like everywhere else in the app, are dB SPL up to a maximum of 105 dB. How Detection Works explains what the numbers mean.
Your recordings live inside the timeline. There are no separate files or folders to deal with. Open a night and the audio is right there under the waveform. (To save a clip outside the app, see Export & Sharing.)
When there's audio and you're not recording, a play button appears at the top right. Scroll the waveform so the moment you want is in the center, then tap play to hear it. Tap again to stop. If there's no playable audio at the center, the play button looks forward and plays the next episode it finds. While audio plays, the timeline scrolls to keep the playback position centered, so the bars you're looking at match what you're hearing.
To skip around, tap any point on the timeline and playback moves there. Press and drag to scrub. Playback pauses while you drag so you can find the exact spot, then picks back up when you let go if it was playing before. Same thing if you drag during playback. It pauses, then resumes shortly after you stop, unless you tapped stop yourself.
To hear only certain kinds of sounds, work from the episode list instead of the waveform. Episode cards carry badges for snoring, sleep talking, breathing disruptions, and loud sounds, so you can pick the type you care about. Tap an episode and playback starts about 2 seconds before it begins, so you get a moment of context before the sound itself.
Playback is gapless. When a night is split across several recording segments, the app lines up the next one while the current one is still playing, looking for a compatible segment within about 10 minutes. If the formats match, audio carries on with no audible gap, so a single session can play through a 7-hour night without you switching files.
While an episode plays, the app shows its type label, start time, duration, and end time (the end time is hidden at the largest accessibility text sizes to save space), plus the peak and average volume in decibels and a waveform of the sound. That's how you find out how loud your snores were. Watch the dB figures while you listen. The app also highlights whichever episode is playing and clears the highlight once playback moves past it. As always, the numbers are for your own insight and aren't a medical measurement.
If a recording won't play, a few rules usually explain it. The app won't start playback while a recording is in progress, so stop the session first. It skips files too small to hold any real audio. And playback ends on its own when the audio runs out or when you leave the app. Stopping resets the position to the beginning, so your next tap starts fresh from wherever you pick.
Playback can sound clearer and fuller than the room did at the time. That's on purpose. For recordings made in a quiet room, the app shapes the audio during playback. It boosts the low and mid frequencies where snoring, breathing, and speech sit, pulls back the highs where hiss and fan noise live, and evens out the volume so soft sounds come up while loud snores stay in check. Faint breathing you'd miss in the raw audio becomes audible.
There's no switch for this. The app decides based on how the recording was made. Quiet-room recordings get the clarity boost. Recordings made while other audio was playing skip the shaping and stay close to their original levels, since they were already captured at full volume. Either way you get the clearest playback available without touching anything.
