I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my queue of things to listen seems to be growing constantly; I can never catch up. What's frustrating about this is that most people talk too slowly on podcasts. To be fair, they are speaking at a reasonable conversational pace, but when you are simply listening to a conversation rather than taking part in it, you can take it all in at a much faster pace.

While iPods have been able to speed up audio books for some time, the latest 3.0 iPhone / iPod Touch release has added the ability to speed up (and slow down) podcasts as well as audiobooks. That's the good news. The bad news is that whatever the algorithm is that is being used to speed up the audio ends up sounding quite rough.

For podcast listeners that are not using an iPhone or iPod Touch, there are not many options for speeding up podcasts, short of doing it yourself manually with a program like Audacity.

Luckily, there's a new site that is looking to take care of this problem for us. PodShifter is a site that will allow you to enter the RSS feed for a given podcast, and it will spit out a new feed URL that will deliver podcasts that are sped up to exactly the speed you prefer. You can choose from slowing down your feed to 0.6 times its original speed, all the way up to 3.0 times the original speed, in increments of 0.2. Based on the demo MP3s on PodShifter's homepage, the sped-up audio is quite smooth.

Unfortunately, in my testing PodShifter has generated new podcast RSS URLs, but when I put them into iTunes, the audio files that I get are exactly the same speed as the originals. I was surprised that they downloaded at all to begin with, so I'm hopeful that there is processing going on in the background and a new version of the podcast will arrive that actually is sped up.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it is quite likely that some podcast publishers will not be thrilled about a republishing service such as this. Larger podcasts that rely on download statistics for determining advertising rates could potentially lose track of the subscribers that sit behind a republishing service like PodShifter. And unfortunately PodShifter's site is not particularly forthcoming with information, so it's hard to determine whether they offer publishers some manner of tracking statistics properly.

In any event, the service that PodShifter provides is a very useful one, and one I hope will succeed. Now excuse me while I go refresh my podcasts to see if any of my PodShifter subscriptions have delivered on its promise.

[via Lifehacker]

Amazon has entered into an agreement to buy digital audiobook service Audible.com. The deal is valued at $300 million, and allows Amazon to dramatically expand its digital audio offerings. While Amazon already offers millions of MP3 songs for download, Audible is probably the biggest name in digital audiobooks, and has a library of 80,000 titles available for purchase.

What's particularly interesting is that Amazon appears to be engaged in an arms race with Apple over global domination of the digital media sphere. Amazon beat Apple to the punch and Apple have been duking it out to see who can offer the largest DRM-free music library, and both services now let users buy or rent movies and TV shows online.

iTunes users have long been able to download audiobooks from Audible and play them on their computers or iPods. We seriously doubt Amazon will kill Audible's partnership with Apple. There's just too much money on the table for that. But you never know.

[Thanks Cris Pearson!]