As you can imagine, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I listen to everything on IT Conversations, sometimes multiple times as it comes to production, I subscribe to a few other podcasts, and I review audio for inclusion on IT Conversations. One trick that helps, particularly with reviews, is speeding up the audio.
As far as I've been able to tell, there's no convenient slider bar for speeding up audio in iTunes. But, you can easily use Quicktime to get the same effect:
- 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.
I find that 1.5x is a pretty good setting for reviewing shows, but when I want to really listen and learn, I have to go slower (1.2x or so)
I've found no convenient way to do this on my iPod, unfortunately. The iPod supports speeding up playback of audiobooks, which are different, in Apple's nomenclature, from podcasts. An audiobook is an ACC format file with the extension .m4b (opposed to the normal .m4a extension). So, you have to convert the selection to ACC (since most things are MP3s, then rename the file, and reimport. This isn't something I want to be part of my daily routine. If you know of a better way, please share.
