I listen to a lot of podcasts and listen at 1.5-2.0 speed and it’s to the point that I literally cannot stand listening to 1.0 speed anymore as they go too slowly (depending on the content of course).

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simondotau 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Same. Returning to 1x speed makes people sound (to my 2x-abused ears) drunk and slurring their works. If I want to listen to something slowly and carefully, I will just about tolerate 1.25x.

What really frustrates me is watching/listening to discussion of music, because I am forced to listen to the talking at 1x because the music sounds wrong (and is wrong) at anything other than 1x.

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kevin_thibedeau 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The funny thing is that slow talkers sound normal at 2x speed. It's jarring when you hear their actual speech.

	▲	ghaff 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I listen to podcasts at 1x. But there are a few people I've done podcasts with that I do various audio tricks to speed up.

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BurningFrog 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Playing music at 1x should be a pretty simple feature to add to those apps.

Ideally it should be done while encoding.

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ebiester 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm so glad YouTube and other podcast players have moved to support 3.0 speed. As I get comfortable with one, I move it up some. For things like sports and "did you know" content, I can go 2.5 if I'm not multitasking. For technical content, sometimes I'm stuck at 1.0.

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kevin_thibedeau 8 hours ago | parent [-]

You can get browser extensions to do it for all media controls on any site. YouTube's "Premium" for 3x is laughable when it's an internal browser function.

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webstrand 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Another fun thing is if you use an extension you can fast-forward through the advertisements too. For some channels I use around 3.5x playback speed.

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gregoryl 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Ublock origin blocks the ads entirely on Firefox.

	▲	satvikpendem 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They're talking about in video sponsor ads, and those can be skipped using SponsorBlock or similar.

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LoganDark 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Premium is for up to 4x, not just 3x

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thrownthatway 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s an amusing observation.

Likewise, YouTube’s “premium” feature of not displaying ads is laughable when displaying content is literally an internal browser function.

I pay anyway, because I was going to pay for an on-demand streaming music service anyway.

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michaelbuckbee 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Something that the Overcast podcast player does (and probably others) is silence removal, which in some ways is even better than the raw speedup.

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runjake 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am jealous. I can't listen and retain most podcasts at more than 1.0x. I even disable the podcast player functionality that eliminates pauses and silent sections.

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bilater 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same haha. But for me 1.5x is the sweet spot. Anything more and I find myself rewinding a lot. I want to feel comfortable absorbing info and not on constant alert.

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lowercased 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do the opposite in a few. There's some I follow weekly and it's only an hour or so each. I drop it to .7 or .8 because I want to get a bit more time with the hosts. Possibly stupid but I've sort of got used to some of these folks at that speed, and the normal speed is 'weird'. One is a political podcast, and when they play clips of Trump, he does always sound very drunk, but the hosts themselves (to me) don't sound drunk, just... measured. Some of it may be audio quality - I'm getting their microphone directly, often the audio clips are from field recordings.

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thrownthatway 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Except Marc Andreessen, I can’t decode his speech at 2x

Maybe it’s just a matter of practice.