Podcasts are a great way to get up to speed on a topic, keep up with a field. These days we can even “attend” a conference we missed via the MP3s that organizers put online to promote next year’s event. So podcasts can save you a ton of money in travel, conference fees, even university tuition… but this post is about saving time, so let’s cut to it.

I listen to a lot of spoken word MP3s, and sometimes listening to them in “real time” (that is, at 1.0x speed) can be painful. If you’re like me, you’ve probably wished on more than one occasion that you could speed them up. Time is precious, and the ums, uhs, pauses, intros and outros can get on my nerves when I’m in a rush.

So here are a few ways you can listen faster, upping the tempo without a change in the pitch of what you’re listening to (that is, there’s no “chipmunk effect”). You might use any or all of these under different circumstances.

Approach #1 - iPod

If you have a 4GB iPod, apparently there’s an easy setting to listen to your spoken audio at 1.25x. Levi Wallach of Twelve Black Code Monkeys posted about this back in May 2006, and the comment thread proved as useful as the post itself. Since I don’t have an iPod, and 1.25x isn’t fast enough for me, let’s move on to…

Approach #2 - Audacity

If I have a long drive ahead of me, I’ll load up my wife’s MP3 player with interviews and podcasts. Her Our MP3 player (a sweet little Samsung YP-U2JXB) can actually speed audio files up to 1.3x, but the pitch changes too, the chipmunk effect. I usually want to go faster than 1.3x anyway, so I have to speed up the MP3s before transferring them to the player — which has the side benefit of shrinking the files, allowing me to fit more on the player.

A comment on the Levi’s blog post mentioned Audacity’s Change Tempo effect. I already had Audacity 1.2 on my system for recording audio, so I tried it out, and it worked really well… but I have to import the MP3 into Audacity (wait), apply the effect (wait), then export the file to MP3 again (wait). Each step can take a minute or several minutes on a long podcast. It’s doable if I let it run in the background, but a bit of a pain since I tend to forget about it after going off to work on something else while Audacity chugs away.

Bryan Villarin picked up on that Audacity comment too, and in June 2006 posted a handy Flickr slideshow along with detailed instructions on how to use the Audacity 1.3 beta to batch these tasks to operate on a set of files all at once, saving a lot of repetitive manual steps. Thank you Bryan!

Approach #3 - Quicktime Player

When I’m on my laptop, I don’t need to speed up the MP3s in advance — it turns out there’s a painless way to do it on the fly. This real time option also has the added advantage that if miss something someone said too quickly, I can slow things down a bit and rewind, listen to that moment again, then quickly get right back up to the accelerated pace.

I came across this approach courtesy of Phil Windley’s August 2006 blog post about using the QuickTime Player’s Playback Speed slider to kick MP3s up a notch. Check his iTunes-centric instructions out, which I’ve rephrased here for folks who don’t have iTunes:

1. Open an audio file in the QuickTime Player.
2. Choose Show A/V Controls from the Window menu.
3. Drag the Playback Speed slider from 1x to say 1.5x and give it a listen.

In my experience, going past about 1.7x with any of these methods gets pretty much incomprehensible. So while I can’t quite listen to podcasts in half the time, I’ve got it down to about 60%, which means I can listen to an hour of audio in about 36 minutes.

The time I save adds up pretty quickly, allowing me to listen to more and learn more.

Approach #4 - Here’s a micro startup idea for ya… Podcast Accelerator

Take Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services and build a nice web UI (and API) to something like Audacity’s batch processing capabilities, and/or the SoX libraries on Linux. Make sure it works with Yahoo’s supersexy Pipes application that just came out this week. There’s plenty of Pipes coverage here, here, and here (thanks to Mathew Ingram for the links, even though he admits he “doesn’t get” Pipes yet).

Back to the Podcast Accelerator idea… Users shouldn’t have to download, upload, and re-download a podcast, so let them pick an URL from the web, choose an effect (or multiple effects) like Change Tempo (and they could select a new tempo), and download/stream the processed file.

Let users store files in their accounts or in the online drive accounts of their choice. Cache popular selections so they don’t have to be processed more than once.

That would quickly evolve into yet another podcast directory, but user-driven. Existing directories and aggregators could compete by providing (say) 1.25x and 1.50x accelerated download links alongside their standard 1.0x links.

If you know of a service that does this, let me know. I don’t think I’d pay much a year for such a minor convenience (maybe $13 a quarter, or $39 a year for 1000 compressions) , so I don’t think it’ll make anyone rich.

But you know what they say about niches and the long tail… so please do go ahead and prove me wrong. At least you’ll save me some time in the process.

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