How to record your snoring at night

Where to put the phone

On the bedside table, screen down or up, roughly at the height of the mattress and within a metre or so of your head. Not under the pillow: it muffles the microphone, it traps heat, and it will not charge well.

Keep it plugged in. A full night of recording and analysis is hours of microphone and processing time, and starting the night at 40% is how people end up with half a recording.

• Bedside table, within about a metre, nothing covering the microphone
• Plugged in, or at least above 80% at the start
• Do Not Disturb on, so notifications do not interrupt the night
• If you share the bed, note which side the phone is on

Telling your sounds from everyone else's

A microphone cannot see who made a sound. If someone else is in the room, some of what gets recorded will be theirs. There is no way around this with sound alone, so the honest approach is to make it visible rather than to hide it.

Marking that you slept with a partner, and which side the phone was on, is the first step. Listening to a few clips is the second — thirty seconds of audio usually settles the question. Any event you mark as not yours is removed from that night's statistics and the score is recalculated.

Fans, traffic and television

Steady background noise is the most common source of bad data. A fan or an air conditioner raises the noise floor for the whole night, which makes quiet snoring invisible and can make the noise floor itself look like breathing.

Loir measures the ambient level in the first couple of minutes and, if the room is too loud for the sound-based breathing estimate to be trustworthy, it suppresses that part of the analysis for the night rather than reporting a number it does not believe. Speech that runs for minutes — a television, a phone call, a conversation — is treated as outside sound and is not listed as sleep talking.

Storage, battery and what gets kept

Audio is compressed, and a night is roughly the size of an album. The recording is split into segments through the night, so an interruption costs you one segment rather than the whole night — a detail that matters more than it sounds if the phone restarts at three in the morning.

You decide how long recordings are kept. Sessions, audio and the analysis files are never deleted behind your back; when the retention period passes, only the audio is cleared, and the numbers and notes stay.

What to do with the recording

The point of a recording is not to keep it. It is to answer a question: was that snoring or a breathing pause, is it getting worse, did the nasal strip do anything, is this worth taking to a doctor.

Listen to the two or three loudest moments rather than the whole night. Compare a week with a change against the week before. Export a night as JSON with its audio if you want to keep it outside the app, and produce the PDF summary if you are going to a clinician.

• Play the loudest episodes first — they answer most questions
• Compare weeks, not nights: one night is mostly noise
• Export a full night, audio included, whenever you want to
• Take the PDF, not the raw audio, to an appointment

Everything stays on the phone unless you export it yourself. There is no account, no upload and no server involved in any of this.