The Pool Room

Increase Productivity - Speed Up Your iPod Playback!

August 8th, 2007

I listen to a lot of podcasts and audio books on my iPod - while driving to work, jogging, doing repetitive jobs, etc. But I’m a bit of a packrat, and the audio has been piling up faster than I can listen to it all.

Here’s a way to get through more audio: play it back faster!

I didn’t know it until recently, but the iPod supports speedup of audiobooks. Unfortunately, you can’t speed up playback of other audio file types. So you have to trick it into thinking your file is an audiobook:

Step 1: Convert the track to AAC if it’s not already. In iTunes, simply right-click on it and choose Convert To AAC.

Step 2: Turn the new AAC track into an audiobook. For this, you’ll need the Make Bookmarkable script from Doug’s Scripts. Install it as per his directions, then highlight your AAC track in iTunes, and select Make Bookmarkable from the Scripts menu.

Sync the files to your iPod, and you’re good to go.

While listening to one of these tracks, click the iPod’s center button 3 times to bring up the playback speed options, then scroll to the right to set it to Faster. The iPod keeps the pitch the same while speeding up the audio playback, so it’s still very understandable.

The main drawback with this method is that you don’t get much control over the playback speed - it’s just Slower, Normal or Faster. I’d love it if I could speed it up in increments - 1.1x, 1.2x, 1.3x, etc. Some talkers are naturally very slow, and some are fairly fast, so they need different playback speeds.

If you know of a better way to speed up audio playback on an iPod, please post it in the comments!

Entry Filed under: Mac, iPod