Filed under: How-tos, Productivity, Tips and tricks, Podcasting
Listen to podcasts at high speed
More hours of podcasts in your feed bin than hours in the day? Phil Windley feels your pain. He's even figured out how to speed things up a bit without converting all his podcasts to audiobooks:- Right-click the show in iTunes and choose "Show song file."
- Open the selected song file with Quicktime (right-click again and select Quicktime).
- Choose "Show A/V Controls."
- Move the "Playback Speed" slider at the bottom of the window to your preferred speed.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jay said 5:10PM on 8-22-2006
"Sounds to me like a job for Automator."
exactly.
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spil said 5:35PM on 8-22-2006
Welcome to TUAW, Jay.
I'm I the only person who doesnt like podcasts?
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henryaj said 6:25PM on 8-22-2006
There's an option to do this on your iPod; just go to Settings > Audiobooks and you can choose to speed up or slow down audiobooks (and presumably podcasts, by extension) by 25% without affecting the pitch.
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spil said 6:35PM on 8-22-2006
but he's reffering to podcasts, not audiobooks, henryaj.
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Jay Savage said 6:36PM on 8-22-2006
spil: Thanks! although I'm really an old hand around here, back from a long vacation at another blog.
henry: As I said "without converting all his podcasts to audiobooks". The iTunes/iPod will only adjust speed for .m4b files. That means first converting all your mp3 files to ACC, and then renaming all your acc files *.m4b. For many people, that will take ~10 minutes per hour of audio, longer on a G3. The quickTime approach should take less than a minute per file.
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Taod said 8:09PM on 8-22-2006
There seems to be a glitch in Quicktime's audio speed-up that I've been complaining about for some time now to no avail. If you've ever used other speed-up products like 2xAV (for windows), you would see (hear) that you can actually understand speech at 2x or even 3x in some cases. However, in Quicktime it's totally incomprehensible at around 2x. This is because Quicktime's speed-up seems to introduce an echo in the sound which, while fairly unnoticeable at 1.5x or so, makes sounds incomprehensible at higher speeds. Most people assume it's just that fast talk sounds like gibberish, but it's not so: it's a problem with Quicktime. Apple doesn't seem to care though.
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Dave Schultz said 11:02PM on 8-22-2006
Here's my Automator workflow for converting mp3 podcast files to m4b (audiobook) files.
It's ugly, but it works for me.
http://homepage.mac.com/davemail/d/PodcastConverter.jpg
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Les Filip said 5:43PM on 8-24-2006
You could also open the file with djay.app which will allow you to both increase the speed and then adjust the pitch back to normal.
Have a nice day!
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