Ideas: faster podcast listening

Podcasts are a great alternative way of taking in information, but the flexibility of being able to listen to whatever you want whenever you want is balanced with the practical limitation that it takes 30 minutes to listen to a 30 minute post.

But this needn’t be an immovable constraint. A number of readily available applications including Audacity will allow you to take an audio file and change the tempo without altering the pitch. So you can take a 60 minute blog and reduce it to 45 minutes of faster speech or even down to 30 minutes if your brain is up to it, or the speaker is slow enough.

I’ve had a try at doing this as part a Podcasting experiment with a local Church, using SoX (a command line audio utility) to change the tempo before posting both a long and a short version of a podcast. The speech does sound a little like a Dalek, but it is perfectly useable and really does save time.

What would really make this useful would be if sound players, both desktop and portable, provided a playback tempo control for speech playback. The ability to change the tempo on the fly would allow you to adjust it in line with your level of concentration. But having podcast clients automatically change the tempo of podcasts as they are downloaded could be useful to.