I listen to audio books in digital form on a fairly regular basis but the readers usually read much slower than necessary. The novel I have right now sounds just right at 2x speed in Windows Media Player 10.
Here's the problem. My portable MP3 player doesn't have this playback feature.
So...
1. Is there a portable player that can play back at higher speeds?
2. Is there an efficient way to re-encode .wma files or .mp3 files in a time-compressed form? I guess that wd mean w/vowels shortened and all pauses shortened, etc. I'm aware that the Windows Media 9 set of tools can do this, but haven't figured out how to do it on a batch basis. It's tedious in the extreme to do it one file at a time.

I'd love to find a portable audio player that can just play these files double speed (or 1.4x or something, depending on the who the reader is).

The Creative Zen players (the more expensive variants at least, the Vision M, Sleek, Touch) have independent tempo/pitch control. I haven't seen this on any other player though, and strangely Creative doesn't highlight this feature much it seems.

Edit: I can't find any mention of this anymore on the Creative site - I know that at least one recent Creative player can do it because I've played around with it, but which exact type...

To maybe answer your #2 question:

The Foobar2000 0.8.3 "special" download package had a DSP effect called "Soundtouch" that would adjust tempo, etc., IIRC.

You probably could batch encode your files using it as well.

The newer iPods do this. You can find mention of it on the features page, under audiobooks:

http://www.apple.com/ipod/features.html

If you find more info about the tech details I'd be interested to see it.

(it's kind of related to their new Nike integration too, where it adjusts the music to suit the tempo of your workout)

edit: found this in Apple's iPod 101 documentation:

http://www.apple.com/support/ipod101/anatomy/2/#4

Audiobooks (Settings > Audiobooks > reading speed)—This screen allows you to vary the reading speed when you're listening to an audiobook file—this is especially helpful if your book narrator is amped up on coffee or has the delivery of a turtle. You can select Slower, Normal, or Faster to suit your listening comprehension.

I'm not sure whether they mean they're only three speed settings or whether there is further variation with 'faster' and 'slower'.

Thanks for the tips. I couldn't find more info on that ipod feature either... but I wonder if only applies to "officially audiobook" files, as in, audible, etc. The novel I'm listening to right now is just a series of .wma files. Does ipod even play .wma files? Anyway thanks for the info. I'll do some digging on foobar also.

Looks like SoundTouch is only a playback plugin... unless you can point me to info on how to use it as an encoder?

In the Diskwriter, choose "Use DSP" under processing. Then you can encode to whatever format you want and get the DSP effect.

I have done this often for a sales class I am taking. There are 17 cd's worth of material.

I load the wav's in Sound Forge and first use the time stretch function to speed things up. If there's to much increase in pitch, I'll use the pitch shift function to shift down. Once you find the setting that work, you can fire up Batch Converter to do all the tracks

I don't think my Foobar's got diskwriter.. I'm new to Foobar so I'll have to try to figure out how to get the right optional components and plugins working.
Can anyone point me to a good short primer on how to customize Foobar? The quantity of info out there is dizzying... and not super well organized for newbies.



Don't have SoundForge. Like to try to get it working on something free like Foobar if I can...
I could probably do what you've described here with my Cakewalk Sonar, except for the batch processing part, which is pretty important. Maybe I could write a script and batch that way. Will think that over.

Its odd that the 0.8.3 special version is hard to find, but heres a link:

http://www.codec-archiv.de/win/mediaplayer...nload.de%5D.exe

Select "Full" In type of install.

Open the program, put your files in the playlist. goto Foobar2000 > Playback > DSP Manager, move soundtouch to the left window.
Goto the soundtouch menu to adjust tempo.

In the Components > Diskwriter menu, check the "Use DSP" option. You also set your encoder options and paths here.

To encode, rightclick the files > Convert > Run Conversion

OK. Now I'm getting somewhere! I had to tell it where my LAME.exe was, but once I got that keyed in correctly, seems to work fine.
This won't help me w/DRM enabled .wma files, but I rarely find myself in that situation w/audio books (so far) so I think this will be a good work around until I can find a variable speed playback mp3 player!

Hi this info was fine, I managed to speed up playback but as of yet can not manage to save the new files with faster playback. Is this possible?
Thanks from Prague


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http://www.codec-archiv.de/win/mediaplayer...nload.de%5D.exe

Select "Full" In type of install.

Open the program, put your files in the playlist. goto Foobar2000 > Playback > DSP Manager, move soundtouch to the left window.
Goto the soundtouch menu to adjust tempo.

In the Components > Diskwriter menu, check the "Use DSP" option. You also set your encoder options and paths here.

To encode, rightclick the files > Convert > Run Conversion