Every color, zoom level, and tap on the waveform, explained.
The timeline is where a night of audio becomes something you can explore. Once you know what each color means, how the zoom levels relate, and how playback follows your taps, you can go from "I think I snored" to listening to the exact moment in a few seconds. This page teaches you the whole loop: read, navigate, listen.
Snore Timeline draws your night as an interactive waveform: sound over time, with each bar's height reflecting the peak average level for that slice of the night. A centered time indicator shows the exact time at the middle of the display and updates as you scroll or as a recording progresses. Drag the waveform left or right to move through the night; a quick flick keeps gliding and slows to a stop.
The bars carry color so you can spot sound types at a glance:
If the app detected sleep stages, colored background bands show which stage you were in at each point, so you can line up snoring episodes with specific stages.
The shades of orange carry extra meaning. The orange bars stack into shades that show how sound energy spreads across frequencies. Darker orange covers low frequencies, roughly 50 to 250 Hz, the deep rumble of snoring. Medium orange covers mid frequencies, about 250 to 1500 Hz, where harmonics and vowel sounds sit. Bright orange covers high frequencies, about 1500 to 8000 Hz, sibilants like the "s" in "sss". This frequency detail appears on the most zoomed-in view; at wider zoom levels the bars render as solid colors. It exists for personal insight, not medical diagnosis. How Detection Works explains the frequency colors.
If the timeline text feels small, the app supports Dynamic Type. Raise your text size in iPhone Settings under Accessibility, Display & Text Size, Larger Text, and the app's labels scale to match.
The timeline offers five zoom levels, from most detailed to widest: 1-second, 5-second, 1-minute, 10-minute, and 1-hour intervals. The 1-second view shows individual sounds; the 1-hour view fits the whole night on screen. Use the plus and minus magnifying-glass buttons in the top-right corner of the timeline. A single tap moves one level in or out.
Hold a zoom button for about a third of a second to jump all the way to the most detailed or the widest view in that direction. No need to tap through each level.
The app also adjusts zoom and scrolling on its own, and knowing the rules saves confusion:
To stop the auto-scrolling, scroll backward. The moment you move toward earlier audio, the timeline enters frozen mode and stays where you put it so you can browse. If you scroll back past the oldest data already loaded, the app loads the previous stretch in the background and keeps the time you were viewing centered. You can change the zoom yourself at any point with the magnifying-glass buttons.
To reach a specific time, drag the waveform until that time sits at the center; the time indicator confirms where you are. To reach a specific episode, long-press the waveform and the app jumps to the nearest episode, scrolling the episode list to the one closest to where you held.
You don't have to scrub the whole night to find the loudest stretches. Open the episode list to jump straight to detected episodes, then tap one to see its details and play it back. Each episode shows its volume in dB, so you can scan the list for the biggest numbers. Sounds are measured in dB SPL up to a maximum of 105 dB. Episodes & Events explains everything inside an episode card.
Tap the date label above the waveform to open the calendar. It shows the current month and past months; swipe left or right to move between them. Future dates are grayed out, and the right arrow disables itself when you reach the current month, since there are no future months to show.
Nights with recorded audio carry a small dot, so you can spot your data without guessing. Tap any past date with data and the timeline jumps to 10 PM on that night, a sensible starting point for an evening recording. Tapping today's date jumps to the current time instead, since tonight hasn't happened yet.
You can also skip the calendar for neighboring nights: swipe left or right on the Nightly Summary screen to move between nights, and use the same gesture on the Weekly Summary screen to move between weeks.
The strip below the waveform gives you real-time context for whatever the timeline is doing:
Decibel readings here, as everywhere in the app, are measured in dB SPL up to a maximum of 105 dB. How Detection Works explains what those numbers mean.
Your recordings live inside the timeline itself. There are no separate files or folders to manage: open a night and the audio is right there under the waveform. (To save a clip outside the app, see Export & Sharing.)
When audio is available and you're not recording, a play button appears at the top right. Scroll the waveform so the moment you want sits in the center, then tap play to hear the audio at that center point; tap again to stop. If there's no playable audio at the center, the play button searches forward and plays the next available episode. While audio plays, the timeline scrolls to keep the playback position centered, so the bars you see always match what you hear.
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 resumes when you release if it was playing before. The same applies if you drag during playback; it pauses and picks back up shortly after you stop, unless you tapped stop yourself.
To hear only specific 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, giving you a moment of context before the sound itself.
Playback is gapless. When a night spans several recording segments, the app lines up the next segment while the current one still plays, looking for the next compatible segment within about 10 minutes of the one playing. If the formats match, audio continues with no audible gap, which lets a single session play across an entire night of 7+ hours without you switching files.
While an episode plays, the app shows its type label, start time, duration, and end time (the end time hides 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 learn how loud your snores were: scan the dB figures while you listen. These numbers serve personal insight, not medical measurement. The app also highlights whichever episode is currently playing and clears the highlight once playback moves past it.
If a recording won't play, a few rules 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 contain meaningful 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 choose.
Playback can sound clearer and fuller than the room felt at the time. That's deliberate. For recordings captured in a quiet environment, the app shapes the audio during playback: it boosts the low and mid frequencies where snoring, breathing, and speech sit, eases back the higher frequencies where hiss and fan noise live, and evens out the volume so soft sounds come up while loud snores stay controlled. Faint breathing that you'd miss in raw audio becomes audible.
There is no on or off switch for this enhancement. The app decides based on how the recording was captured: quiet-room recordings get the clarity boost, while recordings made while other audio was playing skip the shaping and stay near their original levels, since they were already captured at full volume. Either way, the goal is the clearest possible playback without you adjusting anything.
