How to record your snoring on Android

Someone told you that you snore, and you want to hear it for yourself. Recording your snoring is easy to get almost right and annoyingly easy to get wrong: the usual failure is a recording that quietly stopped at three in the morning.

Written by the developer of Nightjar · Published 30 October 2026

Get Nightjar Records the whole night and plays every snore back. Your first full night is free.

Voice recorder or snore recorder?

Any voice recorder app will record your snoring if it keeps running all night. The trouble is the morning: you have seven or eight hours of audio and nothing that tells you where the snoring is. You end up dragging through the file looking at the waveform, and a fan or a passing car looks just like a snore there.

A snore recorder listens for snoring while it records and marks each stretch on a timeline. Nightjar, the one I make, checks every second on the phone with a sound-recognition model, keeps the snoring and any other sound that stands out from the room as short clips, and drops the quiet stretches. In the morning you get a list: when each snoring episode started, how long it lasted, whether it was quiet, medium or loud, and a button to play it.

Where to put the phone

• On the bedside table, within arm’s reach, on the side of the person who snores. Closer to the snorer than to a fan or an open window helps the snoring stand out.
• Face down, so the screen can’t light the room. The recording doesn’t need the screen on.
• Not under the pillow or the covers, which muffle the very sound you want.
• With a start delay if you take a while to fall asleep. In Nightjar the microphone opens only when the delay ends: now, or in 10, 20, 30 or 45 minutes.

If two of you snore, one phone will hear you both and can’t tell you apart. Two phones, one on each side, is the honest workaround.

Stop Android from ending the recording

This is the part most people miss. To save battery, Android, and some phone makers’ own battery managers more aggressively, close apps that run for hours with the screen off. A recording app that is closed at 3 a.m. gives you half a night and, in the worst apps, an empty graph.

1. Open Settings → Apps and find your recording app.
2. Open Battery (on some phones, App battery usage).
3. Choose Unrestricted. The names vary by phone maker; the point is to take the app out of battery optimisation.

Nightjar checks this before the night starts. If Android is limiting its battery use, the bedtime screen says so and has a button to the battery settings. The recorder also runs in its own small process and starts again by itself if Android closes it, as far as Android allows. Whatever happens, the morning tells you: a gap is listed with when it happened and why, never hidden.

In the morning: check, then listen

Check that the night was really recorded before you believe anything else on the screen. Nightjar’s morning opens with that proof, for example 23:41 → 06:52 · 7 h 11 min · no gaps, or the gaps and their causes if there were any.

Then listen. “Play the loudest” plays the loudest snore of the night, and every episode in the log plays at 1×, 1.5× or 2×. If something counted as snoring was the fan, the cat or your partner, mark it “Not snoring” and it leaves the snoring time and the score. Is it snoring or the fan? goes through how to check by ear.

You will also hear sounds that aren’t snoring, if they stood out from the room: sleep talk, a cough. Nightjar doesn’t label those, but they are on the strip and they play; the sleep talk guide explains what is kept.

Record more than one night

One night is a snapshot. Snoring changes with sleeping position, alcohol, a cold or a late meal, so a single loud night or a single quiet one says little. If you are trying something, side sleeping, a mouth guard, nasal strips, note it at bedtime and record several nights with it and several without. Nightjar compares them and only says one is quieter when the difference is bigger than your ordinary night-to-night spread; with too few nights, it says it can’t tell yet. Your first full night is free; recording every night after it is part of Nightjar Pro.

Nightjar records snoring sounds. It can’t diagnose anything. If you gasp or stop breathing in your sleep, or feel very tired by day, talk to a doctor. The recordings stay on your phone; the privacy policy lists exactly what the app sends.

Nightjar: the whole night, every snore

Put your phone by the bed. In the morning, see when you snored and how loud it got, and play back every snore. No account, no ads, and the recordings never leave your phone.

Get Nightjar on Google Play