No kidding. Overcast has a "Smartspeed" feature that cuts out these pauses. The counter on my app says it's saved me 195 hours to date.
I may get downvoted as just an old man yelling at clouds, but I wish that people would actually take more time to enjoy silence in its own right.
My own kids seem to like doing everything with a pair of headphones on, or a video playing on their devices constantly, but some of my own moments of pure bliss have been sitting in my garden, sans technology, with a book or just petting my cat and stopping to breathe, listen to the sounds of nature and think about ideas.
It's pretty hard to enjoy silence in two second chunks.
Someone might use smartspeed to save half an hour, and then use that time to enjoy nature uninterrupted.
I'm not going to downvote you, but you basically are yelling at clouds. The two kinds of 'silence' are completely unrelated.
Even two seconds of silent time is useful to ponder and reflect. When I am not in 'flow' state while working, I will often just look away from the screen to pat my cat or pick up my guitar for a few seconds to noodle unplugged. I find that helps me to step down from frenetic brain activity and let my subconscious stew on things.
To equate it to a musical analogy - sometimes it is the space between the notes. As much as I respect the technical ability of guitarists that can cram 3000 notes per minute in a long shred solo, I cannot listen to that for more than 30 seconds before my brain is screaming for some relief. I would much rather listen to a blues guitarist or saxophonist play a few notes with enough pauses between phrases to fully appreciate them and wait for the next one with anticipation.
Some silence just is not enriching. I would rather spend an hour in a forest than waiting at the DMV. I would rather enjoy a cup of coffee than wait 10 minutes for a colleague to arrive on time to a meeting.
There are some things that are worth experiencing in their fullest, and there are some things that are only worth experiencing by skimming through.
Like some books are worth deep study, reading, rereading, analyzing, digging, and getting every ounce of value from them. Others give all they have in a rush.
I am in my 20s now but I do agree with you. I enjoy just being with silence around me, especially when reading.
As a consequence, I really appreciate the quiet moments and nature walks etc.
I find that when I’m watching/listening something as long as there are no pauses, I don’t need the 2x speed. Particularly because I find speech often difficult to follow at anything more than 1.3x while at 1.3x the pauses are still way too long.
Smartspeed feature has been a godsend.
This is also a something that NPR has been doing on shows for years - perhaps not 'all' but they certainly do a lot of cleanup.
They also have some training material online, which may be of use to many people doing editing: http://training.npr.org/audio/the-ear-training-guide-for-aud...
The transcript of Pulling Back the Curtain may also be of interest, I think it may have been rebroadcast at some point as well so audio may get turn up.
Edit: http://www.wnyc.org/story/129697-pulling-back-the-curtain/
You think you saved 195 hours, but in reality you saved far less hours (I'm not saying you didn't save any hours).
Silences serve to aid your brain from getting tired, allowing you to catch up and process the information, or to get in diffused mode of thinking.
If silences were completely useless they wouldn't ever be used. You'd download an audiobook from the official vendor, and it wouldn't contain any silences.
I certainly don't notice it easily but I have saved several hundred hours according to it.
(Just went through this exercise to find it last week)
Also, holy shit, this has saved me 255 hours, not counting speedups. That's crazy.
"Smart Speed has saved you an extre __ hours beyond speed adjustments alone."
And with that experience, what are your favorite podcasts?
At some point you'll start to hear what birds and other fast talking animals are saying. I'm not joking. I mean you'll still probably wouldn't understand them.
Listen to folks using screen readers reading off menus and navigation and such. Those users adapt to stuff going much much faster than 2x!
[0] https://webaim.org/techniques/screenreader/ [1] https://www.vincit.fi/en/blog/software-development-450-words...
But then I would shift back to 4,000 wpm and suddenly it seemed so easy to keep pace. And the longer you stayed at 10,000 wpm the easier 4,000 became.
I feel our brains are totally up the challenge.
I'm not sure I'd retain much from a technical conversation at 3x -- for me the drop seems to be somewhere between 2x and 3x.
It's one thing to listen to a very consistent voice repeating very much familiar material. Another to have novel or complex material thrown at you.
My listening speeds range from 1x to 2x, for the most part. If I'm focused on material, 1.5x is almost always listenable. If I'm highly focused, or the speaker is slow and boring, 2x+. If the material is difficult or the speaker exceedingly good, intelligent, and the material well-prepared, 1x - 1.25x works quite well.