Two requirements: headphones (you need much more processing power to deal with crappy speakers and poor audio in general) and lack of significant distractions (you can't afford to think about something else). Also, some apps have crappy audio acceleration algorithms. Overcast does it so well that I use it also for listening to audiobooks.

I also think the article is misinformed. You can speed read by regularly training your brain. Just don't expect miracles and don't believe the "experts" who try to sell you miracles.

https://github.com/waywardgeek/sonic

I think speed rate should be a standard control on every multimedia player, just like volume.

What application do you use for listening?

Unfortunately Overcast is iOS only. Could anyone recommend an Android app similar to Overcast?

I use Podcast Addict [2], but it's a bit bloated to be frank.

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.shiftyj...

[2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...

`ffmpeg -threads 16 -i "$infile" -vn -filter:a "atempo=2.0" -c:a pcm_s16le "$outfile"`;

this produced a .wav file, which is what I fed into Audiobook Builder to produce an .m4b audiobook.

Overcast does a significantly better job, though, and without any extra hassle on my part.

Close to the speed limit for understanding two things are difficult:

- personal names (especially of companies) and aberrations.

- a change of the speaker to someone who has a slightly higher speed or worse audio quality

Unavoidable and super annoying:

how back in the "real world" everything appears to be in slow-motion. It takes ages for someone to just finish a single word...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback%20rate%22))}();

Works on all HTML5 video that's not inside an iframe or otherwise inaccessible to the page-level DOM.

Only tested on FF for Windows and Linux, but it's just vanilla JS.

So I guess intelligent people will be able to understand everything on 2x while dumb ones may not.

Consider that most of us can read text at a normal unhurried speed of 200wpm to 300wpm. We also hear this "inner voice" as we read the written words. This subvocalization is therefore "sounding out" the words at ~300wpm in our head.

However, many people speak out loud at only ~100wpm. For many of us, accelerating speech from 1x to 3x is simply making the speaker sound out the words at 300wpm. Since that's the same as our subvocalization wpm, the meaning is not impossible to follow. Most humans can't move their mouths fast enough to talk at 300wpm -- but with digital technology -- they don't have to.

Spoken recordings at 100wpm is mind-numbingly slow and it would just make my mind wander.

I think the authors should have surveyed a hundred youtube users that always take advantage of the 2x speed option. They would have been surprised to learn that people can follow the meaning of the words at 200wpm very easily.

In fairness, 1) we don't know what the authors considered; they apparently have done a lot of research on the subject, and 2) what you list aren't data

That's true we don't know what they considered but a cursory search doesn't find any primary research on 2x audio acceleration performed by either Rebecca Treiman or Jeffrey Zacks. As for reading text, it looks like RT's commentary on speedreading is based on meta-research[1] and not primary lab research. (It's also possible they published primary research in an academic journal that google doesn't index.) It looks like their comment about speech acceleration is anecdotal instead of being based on rigorous research.

>what you list aren't data

Why not? If an audiofile has speech content, one can count the total words, divide by total minutes, and hence, calculate a words-per-minute. Why is wpm not data? The average reading speed of adults is also well-documented: https://www.google.com/search?q=average+reading+speed+of+adu...

In any case, HN readers can try it themselves on a bunch of youtube videos.

For example, the Scarlet Letter novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnfaAZu0fNE

Another example from a news show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTSr07u8gow

Apple presentation with Tim Cook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zbAFSJCPSI&feature=youtu.be...

Change the playback option to 2x on those videos. Can it really be impossible to understand the meaning as the authors assert?!? For listeners whose native language is not English, perhaps they require the slower 1x playback speed. For most others, I'm very skeptical that 2x speed is impossible to extract meaning.

[1]http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/s...