How do I listen to Audiobooks faster?

December 6, 2011 7:34 AM

How do I listen to Audiobooks faster? So I am an audiobook fanatic. Which means I was happy years ago to find out you coud listen to them 25% sped up using old ipods. That feature went away and then came back. Now Audible.com's iphone app lets you play them at "3x speed" which is in reality only double speed. The weird part is once you listen at that speed it becomes normal which makes me wonder if I can go even faster. Ideas? The fewer number of steps the happier I would be of course.
posted by monkeywithhat to Technology (9 answers total)

My Sansa Clip (which I bought because it was recommended in other AskMe answers) has the ability to speed up audio books but I can't tell you how it compares to what you're used to.
posted by Obscure Reference at 7:49 AM on December 6, 2011

If you have access to the underlying audio files, Audacity should do the job. eHow has a short guide on how to speed up one file at a time, and this YouTube video might be helpful if you want to do this with a lot of audiobooks.
posted by wachhundfisch at 7:55 AM on December 6, 2011

Can I ask a question to your question: does everyone sound like the smurfs when you listen to these sped-up audiobooks, or do they do avoid that?
posted by devnull at 7:58 AM on December 6, 2011

Can I ask a question to your question: does everyone sound like the smurfs when you listen to these sped-up audiobooks, or do they do avoid that?

They totally sound like smurfs when I use my Sansa Clip speed up function. And demons when I slow them down.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 8:01 AM on December 6, 2011

The Audacity “Change Tempo” (as opposed to “Change Speed”) feature keeps the pitch, i.e., no smurfs or demons.
posted by wachhundfisch at 8:07 AM on December 6, 2011

Response by poster: Yeah Audible and apple speed up does not make them sound like smurfs.
posted by monkeywithhat at 8:10 AM on December 6, 2011

(Open source firmware replacement) Rockbox can play files at 2.5 times normal speed with pitch correction, and even faster if you allow pitch to be affected. Playback speed is limited to between 35% and 250% of the current pitch value, so 3x speed requires the pitch to be increased to 1.2x, for example.
posted by seikleja at 9:00 AM on December 6, 2011

There was a time when Windows Media Player had speeding up playback as a default option- I found 1.1x quite nice for podcasts. However I suspect that this, like all useful features, has been removed in recent versions. I'm sure other computer programs can speed them up as well.
posted by Canageek at 9:29 PM on December 6, 2011

If you're game for pre-processing on a pc and you want to batch process a large number of files, SoX may be worth looking at. It'll run on linux, mac, or windows, and includes at least two tempo changing algorithms. I've been impressed with the quality of the WSOLA "tempo" results.
posted by eotvos at 7:06 PM on December 7, 2011