Double Time

A few weeks ago I complained that while the iPhones new speed adjustment feature for podcasts was neat, it was buggy and stopped me from listening to podcasts the way I want to (randomly shuffled and mixed with music). That is all still very much true. (Although hopefully Apple will fix it at some point.)

The end result here has been a rapid collapse in the amount of music I listen to when I am using my iPhone, as if I have to actually CHOOSE, I have to be in a pretty rare mood to choose music over a podcast. If they are mixed randomly, I can have both and I’m happy about it, and the mix generally actually even favors the music. But if I’m in the car for 20 minutes to drive to or from work, I’ll put on podcasts, not music.

Now, I can’t shuffle them any more, so I’ve been listening to them ordered by age, so I’m always listening to my oldest unlistened to podcast. Which is OK I guess.

But then comes the double time stuff. This is GREAT. It is generally not hard to listen to at all. I can listen to double the amount in the same amount of time. And I actually find that I am getting more out of it and retaining more of what I hear. Because the speed of the speech now (almost) keeps up with my thought. (I could probably actually go up to triple speed and that might be perfect for a lot of these.) It makes you realize just how SLOW people are talking normally. Especially some people. The double speed just seems to make everything more easy to engage with.

And yes, I even listened to my own podcast this way, and yes… it is much improved by being compressed from an hour to half an hour at double the speed. It tempts me to figure out a way to speed it up before publishing… then I could speed it up EVEN MORE on the iPhone. :-)

I find it annoying though that you can’t double time the video podcasts. It is making me think of switching to audio only versions where available, or even ditching some of them completely.

Oh, and I sometimes flip to normal speed when listening to music oriented podcasts… although sometimes those are improved by double speed as well. :-)