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Comment by anotheryou | Hacker News Reader

I listen to podcasts at 2.7x speed. There is a funny jump, from the speed where you still vocalize to something faster. It feels like it's pumping it directly in to your brain :)

2.7 is the speed I can jump in any time, if I speed up incrementally I can easily go to 3.2 or something.

(i use windows media player for the speed up, best real-time sound stretching I found)

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I've found that any more than a mild speedup and I lose interest in a spoken word piece. The pauses, the emphasis on certain words, etc all help me put myself into the emotional shoes of the speaker. Without that anchor, my mind quickly wanders and the podcast just becomes a distracting presence.

That's interesting that speeding up your podcast would change your reading speed.

It wasn't like that for me. I used to speed up the voice speed in my head when reading and occasionally drop them all together (so it's a stream of concepts, not voice). Then one day, I noticed that I would drop a lot of emotional nuances when I do, or misread/misinterpret emails and messages from other people. I started to try to slow things down, to even read it in the voice of the person sending the message (assuming I know them well enough to have heard their voice). My reading speed had dropped but it feels like I get a lot more out of what I read now.

By "sound stretching", do you you just mean increased audio speed, or something more complicated? I'm generally stuck at about 1.7x or 1.8x because I stop being able to make out the words even though I'm not having a problem processing them. It's hard for me to imagine 2.7x being remotely intelligible. (Can you do this for any sort of speech, or only speech where you can fill in half the words mentally?)

I've been dying for a audio/video playback program that would speed up faster between pauses (breaths, breaks, etc.) while slowing down to ~1.6 speed for words. I don't even really know what search terms to use. Here's my SE question:

http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/27175/video-...

Would love more info here.

I think PocketCast allows you to clip out longer pauses between words.

As the other comment said, PocketCast does this for podcasts, you can set it to cut the silence. Also I believe Overcast on iOS.

For audiobooks, Listen Audiobook Player on Android does the same, though for some reason I find it distracting for audiobooks.

Unfortunately, PocketCast isn't very aggressive about clipping short pauses in speech, probably because it would tend to mangle things unless done carefully. (I suspect it would require a lot more software sophistication with human speech to appreciably change the average playback speed.) It cut out less than a second over the first few minutes of a conversation I used as an example, so it essentially does nothing.

Thanks for the suggestion, though. I never tried Overcast since I'm on an android, but I suspect it's similar to Pocketcast.

I really wants something that ups the average speed to ~2.5 while maintaining intelligibility.

It depends on the software too. With the good tools at some point vocals will slur into consonants, but it never gets choppy.

It also depends a lot on the source material. This for example is sooooooo slow: https://soundcloud.com/diezeit/auf-ein-fruhstucksei-mit-aus-... (german, but I think you can hear the speed)

This is what I listened too a lot, maybe I'd should have claimed lower speeds for the other podcasts :) But your native language (german for me) is also easier.

For me the best sound speed up I've found is the Android app "Presto" that can be used by the Podcast app as a speedup service. It uses the Sonic algorithm which is specifically tailored for speech speedups above 2x.

https://github.com/waywardgeek/sonic

I used to do that, until I realised that anything I could comprehend at 2.5x wasn't new to me, and therefore wasn't worth listening to at all. I cut my podcast subs by half (to a mere 100!) after figuring that out. I'm now at a lazy 1.4x (entertainment/philosophy) - 1.8x (technical).

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