Speed up your podcasts, part 2

I listen to a lot of podcasts during the week. But that doesn't mean I like to listen to long casts. With podcasts longer than ~40 minutes. I like to get some of my life back. I do this by speeding up them up.
I used the Juice pod-catcher and converted the file using WMP9 Encoder, detailed in this post

Now that I use an iPhone I've stopped using Juice infavor of iTunes
iTunes/iPhone/iPods can play the audiobook/podcast "faster". Approx 1.8x speed.
It does adjust the pitch so people don't sound like chipmonks.

How to do this:
1. Convert the mp3 to AAC.
2. Right click on the file and select "Show in Windows Explorer"
3. When the conversion completes rename the extension m4a to m4b (Audiobook) and delete the mp3 file
4. Add the m4b file to the Audobook folder in iTunes.

Good news is that it will maintain the mp3 tags and embeded images.

More tips:
Create a smart playlist that filters by time and Kind contains mpeg

12 on 12: Tech Cockatil 5

Tech Cockatil
Originally uploaded by bcbeatty.

Tech Cocktail always seems to happen on the 12th of the month. This was the 1st Anniversary of the Chicago networking event.

Speed up your podcasts

Here's how I speed up my podcasts on a PC.

I use Juice to download my podcasts.
Juice has a feature to run a program when a file has been downloaded.
I run use Microsoft's WMP9 Encoder to speedup the mp3 file. Combined with Wmcmd.vbs, I can speed up or slow down an mp3 file to any speed, even convert avi to wma for video podcasts.

I've gotten used to listening podcasts at 2x speed. A side effect is the mp3 file gets converted to wma, and looses all the tags, but my iRiver supports wma so I haven't looked into keeping them mp3.