alt Hacker NewsI listen to a lot of podcasts and listen at 1.5-2.0 speed and it’s to the point that I literally cannot stand listening to 1.0 speed anymore as they go too slowly (depending on the content of course).
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Same. Returning to 1x speed makes people sound (to my 2x-abused ears) drunk and slurring their works. If I want to listen to something slowly and carefully, I will just about tolerate 1.25x.
What really frustrates me is watching/listening to discussion of music, because I am forced to listen to the talking at 1x because the music sounds wrong (and is wrong) at anything other than 1x.
I'm so glad YouTube and other podcast players have moved to support 3.0 speed. As I get comfortable with one, I move it up some. For things like sports and "did you know" content, I can go 2.5 if I'm not multitasking. For technical content, sometimes I'm stuck at 1.0.
Something that the Overcast podcast player does (and probably others) is silence removal, which in some ways is even better than the raw speedup.
I am jealous. I can't listen and retain most podcasts at more than 1.0x. I even disable the podcast player functionality that eliminates pauses and silent sections.
I do the opposite in a few. There's some I follow weekly and it's only an hour or so each. I drop it to .7 or .8 because I want to get a bit more time with the hosts. Possibly stupid but I've sort of got used to some of these folks at that speed, and the normal speed is 'weird'. One is a political podcast, and when they play clips of Trump, he does always sound very drunk, but the hosts themselves (to me) don't sound drunk, just... measured. Some of it may be audio quality - I'm getting their microphone directly, often the audio clips are from field recordings.
Except Marc Andreessen, I can’t decode his speech at 2x
Maybe it’s just a matter of practice.
Same haha. But for me 1.5x is the sweet spot. Anything more and I find myself rewinding a lot. I want to feel comfortable absorbing info and not on constant alert.