DayTracker's Settings window has five sections: Appearance, Segments, Quality, Aircheck Folder, and Startup. This page covers Quality and Appearance; Segments has its own dedicated topic.
Open Settings from the gear icon at the bottom-right of the status bar.
The first section in the Settings window is a Light / Dark toggle. DayTracker ships with Dark as the default — the timeline, lane labels, date list, and aircheck cards are all tuned for it, and most stations leave it there. If you'd rather have the classic light look, click Light and the whole app flips immediately.
The setting is DayTracker-only. It doesn't follow your macOS-wide light/dark preference and it doesn't change anything else on your Mac. Your choice is remembered between launches.
The toggle takes effect right away — no restart, no relaunch. Switch back and forth a couple of times to decide which one's easier on your eyes for the room DayTracker lives in.
The Quality section is controlled by a five-position slider. Each position picks a bitrate for the daily MP3. Higher bitrates sound better; lower bitrates take less disk space.
| Setting | Bitrate | One hour | One day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crummy | 8 kbps | ≈ 3.5 MB | ≈ 84 MB |
| Pretty Good | 16 kbps | ≈ 7 MB | ≈ 169 MB |
| Good (default) | 24 kbps | ≈ 10.5 MB | ≈ 253 MB |
| Really Good | 48 kbps | ≈ 21 MB | ≈ 506 MB |
| Crazy Good | 96 kbps | ≈ 42 MB | ≈ 1.01 GB |
Every setting records at 22050 Hz, mono. The only thing that changes between presets is the bitrate. The settings window updates the file-size estimates in real time as you move the slider, so you always know what a year of recording will cost you in disk space.
DayTracker is a logging tool. The recordings exist so you can answer questions about what went on the air — what song played, who talked over it, when the silence happened. Mono is plenty for that. Stereo would double the file size for no listener-visible benefit when reviewing a log.
Keeping the sample rate constant across every quality setting means DayTracker's resampler never has to switch rates mid-day, and the waveform peaks behind the timeline never have to be regenerated when you change settings. This eliminates a class of edge-case mismatches between audio and visible waveform that earlier builds were prone to.
Your selection is saved the moment you move the slider. The new bitrate kicks in when the next recording starts — that's either after midnight, or when you stop and restart the recorder for some other reason. The currently-running recording continues at the bitrate it started with, so a day's MP3 is always at one consistent quality from end to end.
"Good" is genuinely good. The default 24 kbps at 22050 Hz mono is plenty for logging — voice is clear, music is recognizable, segues are easy to hear. Most stations never need to go higher. Save the disk space.
Multiply the per-day figure by 365 to get a year of recording:
DayTracker doesn't auto-delete old days. You're in charge of when to archive or remove older recordings — see Daily Files for where they live.