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Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

davidbieber.com

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Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#51
post #25

"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…

>audiobooks, it's too easy to become too "performance-oriented" when reading something. Meaning that ticking the box "achievement unlocked, read another book" becomes more important than what you really get out of the book. Did you now retain as much information as possible? You're expressing a common skepticism of 2x+ speedup but it misunderstands why people do it. It actually improves the presentation to 200+ wpm s…

> The slower ~100 wpm (i.e. 1x speed) acted as a barrier to learning.

Unless there is a lot of good evidence, I am skeptical of this claim

Human children are exposed verbally to 1x human speech. Do we really think that making teachers talk faster will improve learning and retention?

Also, according to linguistics, I believe pretty much human languages transmit close to the same bit rate (some languages have longer more descriptive words, some have shorter words, but by and large they average out).

Throughout our evolution, we have been exposed to 1x speech.

My guess would be that are brains don’t have a learning block to 1x speech.

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#52

I love listening to audiobooks at 1.5x-2x speed while I'm walking outside. I can get through 100 books a year this way. Of course I don't take notes or think deeply about the content. Who needs that? In fact, I have no idea which books I've read this year! Or last year! All I want is cross stuff off my vanity to-do list consisting of books collected from HN and get a feeling of accomplishment. And I can tell others a…

I've known a dude who taught at university on the side, besides working on logistics of all things, he said he had a mild form of dyslexia, so he taught himself to read books, by reading each page, on each side at the same time, as some form of compensation. I don't know if I could believe it, but there's document cases of this, and his retention and speed was crazy fast. Could be that he just taught himself to glance and chunk structures really fast, which is what I do, if I try to read fast without regard for safety or pleasure.

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#53

I love listening to audiobooks at 1.5x-2x speed while I'm walking outside. I can get through 100 books a year this way. Of course I don't take notes or think deeply about the content. Who needs that? In fact, I have no idea which books I've read this year! Or last year! All I want is cross stuff off my vanity to-do list consisting of books collected from HN and get a feeling of accomplishment. And I can tell others a…

For a second I wasn't sure if you were sarcastic or not. Apparently the former. Audiobooks even when sped up are still a lot slower than reading. You wouldn't ridicule someone for reading fast, would you. Reading fast is usually seen as an advantage and a sign of reading maturity. But if you listen to a lot of audiobooks you easily learn to do it faster than normal speaking speed. I'm told that blind people, can comf…

I thinking reading fast is a sign of immaturity. When I was a teen I swallowed books whole. I absorbed sentences in a glance. But as I've got older I've slowed down. I re-read more. I choose more carefully. I get deeper into things. Fast reading is for skimming over the surface of things. Which is fine but definitely not a sign of maturity.

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#55
If you already have 'ffmpeg' (which he uses to convert the audio to .wav), then you could keep going and use this for most all the process. Looking at the related audio filters (i.e., -filter:audio, or -filter:a, or -af): - to remove silence : -af silenceremove=1:0:-50dB:detection=peak - to shorten duration : -af rubberband=tempo=4 - if you wanted to quickly/easily normailze the audio : -af loudnorm

This leads to: ffmpeg -i happy_book.mp3 -af loudnorm -af silenceremove=1:0:-50dB:detection=peak -af rubberband=tempo=4 happy_book_out.mp4

You could roll all those options into one filter command, but leaving like this for newer-users to digest. I also tend to re-encode using libfdk (though you need to be sure that your ffmpeg is compiled with this enabled) for a better mp4 (or .m4a or .m4b), so : ffmpeg -i happy_book.mp3 -af loudnorm -af silenceremove=1:0:-50dB:detection=peak -af rubberband=tempo=4 -c:a libfdk_aac happy_book_out.m4a

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#56
I am looking for a podcast application that allows me to customize the voice pitch to eliminate vocal fry. Although many outstanding podcasts are American, it appears that most of them are presented by hosts who use this particular register. I've attempted to ignore or get used to it, but it remains an issue for me.

Additionally, I struggle with hosts who have a habit of ending every sentence with an upward inflection, which I find quite annoying.

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#57

Why fully absorb a book when you can just have it smashed against your brain?

yeah, I was wondering the same. I just saw in another thread somewhere "how to get youtube videos summary with AI". This "hurry up" atmosphere that we're pushing towards ourselves will eat us in form of anxiety and increasing stupidness

Anxiety, sure, but it's not a new trend and I don't think we're any more stupid than we were before.

https://xkcd.com/1227/

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#58

I love listening to audiobooks at 1.5x-2x speed while I'm walking outside. I can get through 100 books a year this way. Of course I don't take notes or think deeply about the content. Who needs that? In fact, I have no idea which books I've read this year! Or last year! All I want is cross stuff off my vanity to-do list consisting of books collected from HN and get a feeling of accomplishment. And I can tell others a…

You forgot your youtube link
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