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Loading ...Speeding Up Podcasts and Audio Books
My killer feature for the iPod is something that probably doesn’t appeal to you. Ok, maybe some of you, but not many. It’s the feature that Apple introduced with the 4G iPods back a couple of years ago. The feature is the ability to speed up (or slow down) audio without changing the pitch (if you are familiar with variable speed tape recorders, you understand that simply speeding up the playback of something tends to also make the speaker sound like a chipmunk).
Why is this a killer feature? It lets you play one minute and fifteen seconds of audio for every minute you listen. In other words, you get an extra 25% of content. I listen to a lot of spoken audio – audio books and podcasts – and this means that I get to enjoy a lot of extra content in the same stretch time. It’s a time saver. You get to save countless hours by listening at faster speeds, just as a speed reader gets to read many more books in the time a normal reader would.
There are some downsides, but I don’t think they are significant for most audio. One is that you have to pay closer attention, since drifting off a bit will mean that you will miss a lot more than you would normally, plus it just takes more concentration to comprehend everything at a higher speed. There are some audio artifacts that sometimes occur as well. Those artifacts aren’t jarring, but do degrade the sound quality slightly. Oh yes, and of course you just have a different listening experience. For some audio, timing and cadence can be a big part of the narrator’s performance. Speeding this up can wreak havoc on it - especially for dramatic naration of audio fiction. On the other hand, I’ve gotten so used to listening to nonfiction at this speed that now when I listen to podcasts at the normal speed, the speaker sounds like he’s talking in slow motion! So to some degree it’s just a matter of getting accustomed to it.
While the iPod is the only (or one of the few) digital audio players that has this functionality built in, it doesn’t let you just listen to anything in this fashion. Nope, you can listen to Audible.com audio books (or Audible’s other paid content like radio programs, newspaper transcripts, etc.), and you can listen to files in AAC spoken word format (.M4B). Since most podcasts are in MP3 format, you have to convert them. This is one reason why I use Doppler Radio as my podcast program, or “podcatcher” – it is the only podcatcher that I’ve found wihich converts files to .M4B. Some others convert to .M4A, but you still need to rename them and that implies updating iTunes with the new filename – a manual and cumbersome process.
While Doppler’s conversion works well, it has its disadvantages too, the main one being that iTunes (which is the program actually doing the conversions) can take a while to convert files. The fastest I’ve seen it work is 20X (or 20 times real time). So an hour-long show will take about 3 minutes at that speed. But most of the time, it seems to range from 5 to 12X, or 5 to 12 minutes per hour-long show. iTunes can only convert one show at a time, and so if you have a couple of hours worth of shows downloading at a given session, this could take upwards of 25 minutes to convert! It’s far from ideal.
Now, while I do have this killer feature with the iPod, I would rather that such a feature existed on other devices so that I wasn’t forced to only use an iPod. Don’t get me wrong, I like my iPod, but there are certainly things I don’t like about it as well. The main thing that irks me about it is that you can’t use music subscription services like Yahoo! Music because it won’t play Windows Media files. Apple’s system is built to be proprietary – you can only use the iTunes Music Store to download music (other than free MP3’s from independent artists or your own ripped from CD), and the iTunes Music Store only supports Apple devices. For those who need the speeding up feature, unfortunately, the iPod still seems to be your only choice.
While I could not find other players with this functionality, I thought I’d see what I could find out about speeding up audio in general. My main find proved quite interesting. It’s a Windows software program that does this very thing called, inappropriately enough, Amazing Slow Downer (or ASD), by Roni Music. I guess the name is somewhat appropriate because it can slow audio down, but it can also speed it up. I’m not sure about the utility of slowing things down, but my guess would be so that musicians can listen to a song at a much slower rate in order to pick up notes and chords more easily?
ASD allows you to take any MP3 file (or other formats as well), speed them up or slow them down arbitrarily with a fine degree of control, and then rip them to MP3 (or another format for other encodings). You can control the pitch yourself, although it seemed to automatically handle that. You can also control the audio qualities via an equalizer in order to yield the best quality sound. I played around with the trial version I downloaded from Roni Music’s site and was able to speed up a sample podcast by 42% and still follow everything. I figure you could probably train yourself to understand higher and higher levels of speed.
This was a great find and maybe there are other such applications out there but I haven’t found any yet. As nice as it is, though, I can see using it for major jobs, but not on such a regular basis as Doppler. Much of the spoken word audio I listen to is downloaded via Doppler on almost an hourly basis. So when I listen to something, it’s often only hours or at most a few days old - an ongoing stream of current podcasts. Unfortunately there’s no way to have Doppler “talk” to this program and have it automatically convert these podcasts into faster ones. Neither is there a command-line interface as far as I can tell, so even if Doppler could issue external commands (which I’ve seen in some other podcatchers), this wouldn’t work. What you would have to do is dump all my podcasts into one directory (Doppler puts them into separate directories named after the podcast’s title) and before uploading them to the iPod you would have to run this program and tell it to convert all new files – also determining which of those files were new so that you weren’t reconverting already converted ones (you could change the names or put them in different directories but this would then mean having to go into iTunes and tell it where those new files were, or what they’d been renamed to – otherwise iTunes would remove them from the iPod). Neither will ASD do anything with Audible files, which is to be expected since they have a proprietary DRM. Then there’s the issue of speed. The trial version of ASD only lets you work with 3 minutes worth of audio. I was able to rip this to a 2-minute-long MP3 in a matter of seconds, but it’s hard to extrapolate this to a 30-minute podcast, let alone a bunch of podcasts of various lengths adding up to a couple of hours worth of listening.
Where ASD might come in handy is if you find a bunch of MP3 spoken word files that you want to listen to - say open source stuff from Librivox or Project Gutenberg. Or possibly if you find a podcast that you’ve never heard but has been recording for many months and you want to catch up and listen to all the old episodes. Or you buy a new audio book on CD and want to rip it to MP3 to play it on your portable device. I can see using this for such things because they are one-shot deals rather than a constant, ongoing process.
We can dream that Erwin Van Hunen, the creator of Doppler, will put this type of functionality into Doppler 3.0, but considering how busy he is with other things, it’s hard to imagine that he could devote such resources to what is essentially donationware.
Despite the probably small number of people who find this functionality irresistible, perhaps there are enough of us to encourage a developer out there to create a podcatcher that has similar functionality, or maybe the developer of ASD will actually consider developing a podcatcher with it? Or perhaps we can get Roni Music to partner with Erwin and come up with a premium podcatcher that has this functionality. Well, we can dream!
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May 4th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
I have no idea what I would do with this feature, but it just made me want an iPod even more. Is it available on Shuffles? (I’m thinking no?)
May 4th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Hey Meredith, my guess is no (at least there’s nothing about it on Apple’s site), but the shuffle is not the best choice for listening to spoken word. Unless you are just listening to one audio book. Otherwise the lack of a screen makes navigation amongst different tracks pretty painful. If you are looking for something at a lower price point, you can get plenty of older iPods on eBay for a cut rate, and of course there are other MP3 players out there that cost less but offer just as many (if not more) features…
May 4th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Also take a look at Transcribe! from http://www.seventhstring.com … for the same price it’s a much cooler program than ASD in terms of flexibility, especially if you want to do more with it than just speed up sound files (and it costs the same). To my ear it also does a better job than ASD of speeding up or slowing down files if that IS what you want it to do and comes in Mac and Windows versions. It has a free demo available, so at least compare the two before deciding.
May 4th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Craig, thanks for the heads up. I guess this is a better solution at least for those with Macs or running Linux - well, maybe the only solution?
I downloaded it and tried it out and unfortunately it seems to be missing some key elements that ASD has: you cannot export to MP3, only to WAV and AIFF (which you could then convert to MP3, but that’s adding another step). Also, it seems to have only one faster speed option - 50%, so if that’s too fast, or you want to go even faster, you’re out of luck. Finally, you can’t load multiple files into it and then do a batch export/convert.
Obviously it has some things for musicians that ASD doesn’t, but for this purpose it seems to be at a disadvantage…
May 4th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
Audacity is great for this, at an unbeatable price ($0). http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ (though SourceForge seems to be down at time of posting)
It is cross platform, open source (free), and does speeding up audio excellently (as well as being a general purpose audio editor). There was a beta of the next version last time I checked that allowed bulk conversion. Unfortunately no command-line.
Effect menu, Change Tempo is the command you want.
I’ve been pushing myself for a year or so now, and can now follow spoken word at 160% of normal speed with what I think is better comprehension (you have to concentrate, so your mind doesn’t wander, so you comprehend and retain more).
May 5th, 2006 at 8:24 am
The ability to slow down your audiobook or podcast can be useful for those listening to something in a language in which they aren’t fluent. When you can only speak a little of a language, it can be difficult to understand someone talking fast or even at a normal rate.
May 5th, 2006 at 9:44 am
Matt, thanks. I knew about Audacity but not that it had this feature. I downloaded the beta and it seems to work well. The main problem is that I can’t figure out how to do batches , if this is even possible. I’m not that familiar with the program, but if there is a way to do this, it’s not obvious and streightforward, not has the documentation been updated to include such new functionality. The other “problem” I found was that it takes a while to load each audio file. Nothing huge, maybe 30 second for a 30-minute show. But this does add to the time needed to convert a file, and if you are doing many, it can add up. On the other hand, you can’t beat the price!
Perry, you make an excellent point! ASD and Transcribe are definitely marketed toward musicians, but your example is an excellent use for those trying to learn a new language, or simply wanting to better understand something in a language they aren’t completely fluent in. I studied Russian in college and graduate school and then some Italian on my own later on, and having such a tool would have been really useful when listening to audio passages. Of course, this (other than the Italian) was in the dark ages before there was such a thing as an MP3!
May 8th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
1 program - Cool edit Pro.
It has since become Adobe Audition, but there are still plenty of places online (Google ist Krieg) where you can find yourself a copy for Windows.
Cool edit can do pretty much everything Audacity can, and pretty much does it better. The only problem I’ve had with it is that it doesn’t deal directly with Apple’s AAC, although I think you could make it if you had the right DirectX plugins. Use the Time Stretch/Speed feature.
Check it out http://ww w.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Edit
May 9th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Levi, you’re right about Transcribe! not offering batch or MP3 export, but the speed IS variable from 5% to 200% in 1% increments.
May 12th, 2006 at 10:19 am
Sox (Sound Exchange) is another great program for modifying digital audio. It comes bundled with most Linux distributions. It has many filters including speed up or slow down.
I used it to record audio input from a tape deck with high speed dubbing. I figured out that the tape deck played at 1.6x so I just had to slow down the input by that much to get the original tape audio. I then sent the audio to LAME (Lame Ain’t an MP3 Encoder) for MP3 encoding. But you could easily use it in reverse to speed up your audio.
BONUS — With Sox on linux, you can easily setup scrips and schedule them (possibly with Cron) to process all your incoming podcasts.
Sox at Sourceforge: http://sox.sourceforge.net/ (Sox is Open Source Software)
June 18th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
In audible, you can do a bath convert if you import multiple files into a project and the select all and then do the conversion.
September 12th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
I would like to speed up a song on a CD, I’ve imported it on i-tunes but there’s no features for doing this. any tips?
September 16th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Kai, as I mentioned in this article, there are various programs that will let you speed up mp3 files, including Audacity, which is free. You could try one of these which would let you speed it up to the exact speed you want.
There’s a way of doing this without such a program, but it has it’s limitations: you have to convert the file to an AAC (.M4A) file in iTunes (it should be one of the menu choices, although it may only say “convert to MP3″ in which case you need to change your conversion preferences and choose the AAC encoder. Once it’s a .M4A file, you will need to rename it to .M4B, and then your link to it in the iTunes library migth become invalid, so you may have to re-add it to your library. Then, once you transfer it to your iPod, you should be able to, once you start playing the song, to click a few times till you get to a page that lets you change the speed. But unfortunately this only lets you play it at normal speed, or “faster” or “slower.” The “faster” and “slower” speeds are either 20% or 25% faster or slower. You can’t modify HOW fast or slow…
October 31st, 2006 at 12:34 pm
I use a program called music morpher made by audio4fun. It batch converts very simply and effectively. I regularly listen to books and lectures at 250% speed. When I’m reviewing something I’ve already heard, I get up to 350%. Though I don’t hear every word at that speed I get every concept. I swear by speed listening. It’s the first method I’ve found for really expanding bandwidth. My podcast is available in both normal and 150% speed on my site. I’m still waiting for a site called podfast.com that speeds up all of your podcasts for you.
November 27th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
hmm. i want to speed up a song kind of like a mix. any way i can do tht for free?
November 27th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
Kaitlyn, you can use any of the programs I list for doing the same thing with music. Audacity is the main one that is free.
December 8th, 2006 at 4:29 am
yes.. i agreed,definitely we save lot of time when we speedingup podcasting audio books,audio book time increases then listener lose his concentration.audible is a great site for audio books. http://www.karaditales.com
December 26th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
this is called speed listening. the BOT(books on tape) available every where can be listened to on an old fashioned player|recorder which can yield play rates of 33% or greater in some cases, but one must adapt your ears for the whiny sound. these recorders almost all have built in speakers as well. cost about 25 to 40$. i await an device for easily converting audio cds to speed listening files.
December 27th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Sorry Scott, but I don’t think I’d want to listen to tapes of books that sound like chipmunks, besides which those players are not to portable, and I do a majority of listening while driving or walking…
June 11th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Does anyone know of any MP3 player for Nokia handphones with this kind of feature?
September 20th, 2007 at 10:25 am
Just for completeness, there is an MP3 player that plays back at varying speeds (1.3x, 1.5x, 0.5x, 0.7x), the RadioYourWay LX. But users have experienced button failures after a while, so I can’t recommend it for everyone. Also, it costs $200 with 128MB and an SD slot–its distinguishing capability is timer recording of AM and FM radio, also does line-in recording: http://www.pogoelectronics.com/radioyourway.html
December 1st, 2007 at 8:26 am
One of my usability nightmares switching from Windows Media Player to iTunes was having to lose the ability to speed up my music. Right now I’m listening to a book on MP3 at 1.0 speed on my 5.5 G iPod. I know I can speed MP3s up manually as you said–I’ve been editing music for years using GoldWave or Audacity; but with Windows Media Player, it was never necessary, since there’s simply a speed dial. With the iPod/iTunes you have to get an external program to permanently speed it up, and that’s just rarely worth it as you’ve noted. The iPod & iTunes need a native speed dial. Yes, it’s financially viable, not just because of audiobook listeners, but because of the blind–those who listen to books because they can’t see always listen to their books at super speeds, commonly up to 4x speed! And there are 10M blind people in the US. Speed dials have always been a common accessibility accomodation which iTunes simply didn’t value.
December 1st, 2007 at 9:40 am
Hi Colin, I may not have mentioned this in my blog entry, but you can use the iPod’s own speed-up feature by simply converting the mp3 to an aac file in iTunes and then renaming the extension from .m4a to .m4b. So you don’t necessarily need a third-party app. Although you will only be able to speed it up by 25% and not a customized amount…
March 6th, 2008 at 12:12 am
My husband would love this. He currently has a 1GB iRiver that speeds podcasts in mp3 format up to about 40% (not fast enough) and wants a player with more capacity. He cannot listen to them at normal speed now (picture a dog with his head hanging out the car window going 100 miles an hour - this is how the man likes to receive his information). I have scoured the internet looking for a player for him. This program won’t do it (conversion is too slow). I’ll keep my fingers crossed. If someone is working on it, maybe it means there is a market for it and my husband is not the only freak who likes to listen this way.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Wow, I haven’t been keeping up with all the MP3 players out there but I’m glad there are ones like the iRiver that speed stuff up like the iPod, and 40% is a lot better than the iPod. Now we just need this to show up in more players and have a variety of speeds. Why not just let the user select the exact speed they want at any given moment, just like a volume dial? You could go from normal to +200% or -200%?
Actually, I’m no longer listening to podcasts these days, and part of the reason is all the extra work processing the files. At least with the audiobooks I listen to, I can automatically speed them up with my iPod. I will have to take a look at the iRiver, and I believe there may be others, so that I can listen to things faster without spending the time to convert them…
April 29th, 2008 at 3:49 am
I read your article and Audacity worked for me. The file I had was slowed down so much I had to do a 33 1/3 to 45 speedup twice! Which I like that as an alternative speed adjustment rather than just a percentage adjustment. Thanks a lot
August 5th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
hey, ive just wrote a blog on this very topic. Ive been doing this speed Listning for a while now and i think it is really fun and amazing way of filling my mind with information. And as you can probly see in my blog site name , we also share another two commonalitys, Im BeWiseMonkey.com and ive just moved to Wordpress.com Check out my Blog on Speed Listning and we can keep in touch also .http://bewisemonkey.com/2008/08/05/comprehend-faster-speed-listening/ Thanks
November 10th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Rockbox is an open source (free) operating system available for many portable players (eg first generation iPod nano) that allows you to do this. The feature is not necessarily implemented for every player but if you are geeky you may like to join the rockbox community and add the feature for your player. They have an IRC chat channel on the freenode network.
November 10th, 2008 at 11:22 am
I use Steinberg’s WaveLab which is a professional audio editor and i convert files to double-speed in batches.
Double-speed is fine for news and documentaries but takes some training. On the odd ocassion consonants get dropped (especially “k”, I think).
Am thinking about offering multi speed soken downloads on my site.
There are two drawbacks with WaveLab:
1. Some ID3 tags will confuse it (you have to remove them mmanually first)
2. I have not figured how to run Wavelab (with this batch conversion) as a command line.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:44 am
audacity is a bad way of doing this. it is seriously slow and inconvenient. last time i tried audacity it did some nutty things, its like it wrote all the files as uncompressed back to the drive first eating up gobs of space.
foobar+soundtouch dsp for batch conversion into mp3 or mp4 allows up to 200% increase in speed and encodes quite fast. on an e2200(low end cpu) it encoded mp4 files at 80x real time, so it doesn’t take long to chew through material. even faster for mp3.
gomplayer is free and allows 10% increment speed change on the fly for stuff you playback on the pc. including video. up to 4x, i find 2-2.5x is enough lol. one things for sure, they need to add this in more hardware/software. the ipods 25% increase is not even worth bothering with. you need quite a bit more than that. narrators seem to be reading at the lowest common denominator speed, mind numbingly slow for most adults.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Perhaps it’s useful for those who can only allot a little of their time listening to audio books. As for me, it’s more enjoyable and satisfying when the audio is played in it’s normal pace. But, it totally depends on a person’s preferences.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this info Levi =))
July 28th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I’m desperate for an automated batch flavor of speeding up playback. Why, oh why, didn’t Apple support speed selection on podcasts?! I’m currently manually moving all audio podcasts to audio books.
Foobar: fantastic tool. I used this with soundtouch until I broke down and got a Nano. No command line interface, so I can’t automate it through doppler.
I currently use Mp3Tag– and awsome free tool (www.mp3tag.de) to remove the podcast tag then import folder to iTunes, then move to audio books. A lot of steps. I wish Mp3Tag could be command line driven. The developer hasn’t been convinced this would be a popular feature so doesn’t want to invest.
Sox: High potential for my automation goal. Con: I can’t find/build the LAME extension to set the output format in MP3.
Well, that’s the route I’ve taken. I’m still not where I’d like to be but I can feel the potential to get there. I love listening to podcasts and audio books at high speed.