This is built into Overcast which is a decent podcast app.
Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
11–20 of 129 posts
Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
#12I listen on audio books between 100-300% speed, depending on the reader, topic and my mood. For majority of books, I'd go crazy if I was stuck to 100% speed.
VLC on Android is great for this.
Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
#13I use the app Pocket Cast and listen to podcasts in sped up form.
Current stats: * Listened for 27 days 9 hours, * Manual Skipping: Saved 17 hours, * Increased speed: Saved 31 days 21 hours, * Auto trim silence: Saved 6 days 14 hours
Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
#14"This tool won’t be appropriate for all audiobook listeners. For many, the silences matter, and removing them would degrade the quality of the book. For many, listening at 2.5x would also degrade the quality of the book. So use this tool with caution." It's nice that this was also brought up. At least for me, even though I don't listen to audiobooks, it's too easy to become too "performance-oriented" when reading som…
I would say that to have read a text is not the goal, it's a mere implementation detail. The goal is to understand ideas which the text tries to convey.
Some texts, and usual human speech, are low-density, high-redundancy. If you can easily understand the ideas they carry, you can listen at a really high speed and still don't miss anything, and later be able to adequately recall the ideas.
Some texts are either higher-density, or talk about concepts novel enough for the listener, and it takes some time to unpack the ideas and commit them to memory. Such texts cannot be read too fast, and sometimes require going back a sentence, or a paragraph, and re-reading.
An ideal (from the efficiency standpoint) audio book device would have a speed dial to control the level of adaptive compression, like described by the linked page. It would also have controls to jump back a sentence and replay it slower.
But such device is unlikely, because I suppose that the main audience of audio books is commuting drivers, who need to keep their hands on the wheel, and their eyes on the road, so they can't properly read.
And if course I suppose that the speedup and compression are barely applicable, or need a different approach, to books read with some artistic expression (that us, most fiction worth reading).
Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
#15the embedded comments section in the blogpost seems to lead directly to a discord channel. thats a pretty unique comment system! wonder how effective it has been for the author.
Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
#16I often listen to talks at faster speeds, but there's a trick to it: ramp the speed.
Start at 1x, then increment the speed slowly over a bit of time giving your brain time to adjust. You can easily get to 3x speed by "ramping" the speed over a period of time.
Is there any audio book reader that supports such speed ramping? In an automatic way?
Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
#17"This tool won’t be appropriate for all audiobook listeners. For many, the silences matter, and removing them would degrade the quality of the book. For many, listening at 2.5x would also degrade the quality of the book. So use this tool with caution." It's nice that this was also brought up. At least for me, even though I don't listen to audiobooks, it's too easy to become too "performance-oriented" when reading som…
I would say that to have read a text is not the goal, it's a mere implementation detail. The goal is to understand ideas which the text tries to convey. Some texts, and usual human speech, are low-density, high-redundancy. If you can easily understand the ideas they carry, you can listen at a really high speed and still don't miss anything, and later be able to adequately recall the ideas. Some texts are either highe…
I wish we just didn't write low-density, high-redundancy non-fiction anymore. Especially books written in the "self-help" style where about 1% is the core message, and 99% are illustrations, examples, author's opinions, and similar.
That 99% is very easy to find online in the age of information deluge, it's probably where the author sourced it. Before the 00s, this content in a book would have been helpful. But these days, it makes sense that most people want to skip it or 2.5x it.
I used to carry a reporter notebook and take notes all the time I was listening to audio books. This made it very obvious that there's usually not a lot of information to extract from business books, leadership books, or any other kind of "coaching" books. Now I try to buy the summary variant of these books. Because ultimately, I was making my own summaries in a very time-wasteful way.
Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
#18Oh my god. This increases my stress level just reading about it.
I am happy I’m past the quantity stage and into actually enjoying things part of my life.
Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
#19I routinely watch videos and listen to audiobooks at 2.75x, that's somehow the magic number for me. I can only do it with the headphones (not speakers) and I only lose a negligible number of words.
I'm not planning to stop but I have noticed that after a few years of doing this, my speech has gotten faster. This is not good because I feel sometimes I don't let people process what I say and sometimes I make them feel rushed. I suppose fast listening is subconsciously training me to speak faster
Another interesting observation is that I often don't know what the theme musics of my favorite YouTube channels sound like because they sound very different at a faster speed. When I accidentally hear them at normal speed I think to myself that they actually sound a lot nicer than what I'm used to.
Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)
#20I like how this is different from many other tools, as it can also leave the pauses untouched while speeding up the speaking. For me, listening at something above >2x is often hard, as it gets all mashed together. Most tools that speed up "dynamically", does so by removing the silent parts. But I need those, those are the ones telling me when one word ends and the other one begins. So I'd like more tools to do the opposite: increase the speed of the words, but keep the pauses between words so my brain registers the start/end.