Listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed

Jan 06, '06 06:22:00AM

Contributed by: merlyn

I subscribe to far-too-many podcasts now, and I've found that most of the podcasters can actually be cleanly understood even if you speed up their speech by 50%. So, when my iTunes shows that I have 45 minutes left on a podcast, and I'd rather hear that in 30 minutes, I pull down my script menu to reveal and execute the following AppleScript (saved in my user's Library -> Scripts -> Applications -> iTunes folder as Play this song at 1.5x):

tell application "iTunes"
  pause
  set my_track to location of current track
  set my_seconds to player position
end tell

tell application "QuickTime Player"
  open my_track
  set my_movie to first movie
  set ts to time scale of my_movie
  set current time of my_movie to my_seconds * ts
  set rate of my_movie to 1.5 -- starts playing
end tell

Basically, this tells iTunes to stop playing the podcast, figures out where I am in the podcast, then tells QuickTime Player to start playing the podcast at the same place (within a second), but at 1.5 times the speed. Note that the pitch is unaffected -- only the playback rate changes.

I haven't done a lot of testing with what happens when you have multiple windows already open in Quicktime Player, so I could be wrong on guessing my_movie in the script. Feedback welcome!

Comments (45)

Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060103000452805