Audio Killer Feature

Last night I listened to the latest Stack Overflow podcast, since it was about Mono. Personally, I am not a big fan of podcasts or videos, as I find them to be a very inefficient way of learning. It is much quicker to read an article (and reread the sections you want) than to listen to an hour of rambling.

Anyways, the one thing that makes it more tolerable is a feature of Windows Media Player called Fast Playback (they also have Slow Playback). It plays the stream at 1.4x (I think) speed, so less time is wasted.

I have never seen this feature in another media player. Are there any other media players that support this?

Comments

Unknown said…
from keyboard control section of mplayer's manpage:

[ and ]
Decrease/increase current playback speed by 10%.

{ and }
Halve/double current playback speed.

backspace
Reset playback speed to normal.
July 17, 2009 at 12:11 PM
Anonymous said…
yep, mplayer will do that on both audio and video - even dvds... mmm... the Princess Bride at 1.6, with Andre, the Giant... Chipmunk.
July 17, 2009 at 12:36 PM
Anonymous said…
ps3 player does 1.5x
July 17, 2009 at 1:02 PM
Juan Cristóbal Olivares said…
VLC (www.videolan.org) also has this feature...
July 17, 2009 at 1:04 PM
Anonymous said…
IMHO it's completely irrelevant if your media player can change the playback speed but can't keep the pitch the same. MythTV does this sort of time compression (up to 2X I think) and keeps the pitch the same as the original. It makes all kinds of shows more tolerable.

My personal favorite for this feature is "How It's Made" from Discovery's Science Channel. That show is absolutely maddening at normal speed but pure joy at 2X.
July 17, 2009 at 1:08 PM
Amber said…
As you can gauge from the above... what player do you put up with that does _not_ have altered playback speeds. Mplayer indeed is my weapon of choice.

Once I need to preserve the pitch, i'll use sox (play bla.mp3 -tempo 1.4; sox has the neat speed, tempo, pitch effects).

I'll have to go and try mythtv because if it does the pitch-preservation trick while changing playback rate on the fly, that would porbably win me over!
July 17, 2009 at 2:53 PM
Jonathan Pobst said…
Sweet, it's nice to know that some other players have this as well.

The other players I have tried that do not appear to have this feature are iTunes, Miro, and Banshee.
July 17, 2009 at 3:09 PM
rockpiper said…
even my years old ipod (5.5th gen) has this. including pitch adjusting.
July 18, 2009 at 6:30 AM
Niklas Höglund said…
The first player I ran into with this feature was Alsaplayer. It is a lot of fun to run various music at different speeds. 100% speed backwards is particularly good.
July 20, 2009 at 3:44 AM
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