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]

A little over a year ago I wrote a post entitled How to Fix iTunes. One of the utilities I pointed to in that article is called idleTunes, and I used it to keep my iTunes library tuned up, and to export playlists of podcasts to my non-iPod MP3 player. While I still love idleTunes, it stopped working with iTunes back when Apple updated to iTunes version 6, and has not been updated since last summer. So, I finally went looking for a suitable replacement, but I'm having very little luck.

The only utility I can find that is supposed to do what I'm looking to do is called iTunes Agent, and unfortunately for me it does not seem to want to play nicely on my computer. Once started, it takes over 30 seconds to respond to any command, and has become totally unusable to me. I'm fully willing to consider the fact that the problem could be my PC, given the number of downloads I test. But a reinstallation is not on the cards right now, considering that otherwise my system is working fine. So I need to find an alternative solution.

Here are my needs:

• Needs to be able to export any playlist from iTunes to any specified folder or drive
  
• Needs to generate an M3U playlist to keep the audio files in the correct order

And here are my "nice to have's":

• It would be nice if it could optionally delete the tracks from iTunes (and the hard drive) upon successfully syncing to a folder / device
• It would be nice if it could add new tracks and delete dead tracks from the iTunes library

So, based on these requirements, do you know of a utility that I should be trying? I realize Apple probably doesn't look too kindly on people writing this sort of software, since they try so hard to push you into buying an iPod. And while I'd love an iPod, I can't currently justify the purchase of one. So I'll leave it to you, dear readers, to point me in the right direction.