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Tweak the scrubbing speed in iOS 7's Music app
Authored by: Mike Perry on Nov 07, '13 05:50:42AM

Thanks for the tip, but scrubbing fast doesn't solve my primary 'speed' gripe with Apple in both OS X and iOS. That's the limited and absurdly chosen faster or slower playback options: 1/2 x, 1x, and 2x.

Did anyone at Apple actually listen to a podcast or audio book at those speeds? 1/2 x is ridiculous slow and 2x is ridiculously fast. My own hunch is that halving or doubling is slightly easier to program and that became the driving factor. No one actually listened to how awful the result was. Varying speeds just become another item to be checked off.

I listen to a lot of podcasts as well as audio books. I've experimented with apps that do (or in some cases once did) allow a wider range of speeds. 1.25 x is marvelous for almost everything. If anything, it makes things move just fast enough to make them more interesting. And it means users can listen to an hour in 45 minutes, a big time savings in our busy world. There's also some light humor and chit-chat that works fine at 1.5 x and some really heavy topics could benefit from being played at .75 x.

With some $140 billion in cash reserves, you'd think that Apple could afford to spend a mere pittance on variable playback speeds that are actually useful and that would save their users time.


And unfortunately, those speeds seem to be hard-coded into the tools Apple offers developers, so it's more difficult for them to offer more sensible speeds too.







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