Someone asked us to support 4x playback speed in Metacast 🤯 We asked "why?" and got surprised (meta-point - always ask your users why they want something...) We learned that people who have visual impairments can develop an unusually sharp listening skill and are able to consume content at very high speeds. This makes sense. They can't read, so they listen to podcasts/books at "reading speed." It turned out some "regular" people also develop the skill of comprehending information at high speeds for efficiency. They want to get through massive amounts of content quickly. That's definitely not me, but the use case makes sense too! You might also wonder who listens to podcasts on 0.5x? We discovered that some people learn a new language by listening to podcasts in foreign languages. Slowing down the playback helps them comprehend the speech. FWIW, I often find myself needing to slow down Marc Andreessen when I listen him talk excitedly on the a16z podcast! Up until now, we had a very rudimentary speed control in Metacast Podcast Player. It was an embarrassing second-class hack just to get by through the first release. Now, the speed control is a first-class citizen that lets users adjust speed from 0.5x to 4x with 0.1x increments, sane defaults, snapping and a feel-good haptic feedback. -- Metacast is a simple yet powerful podcast app with transcripts for every podcast ever published. Get it for iOS and Android at https://metacast.app.
John Wilger
2mo
What I’d really love: I want to be able to set a “sleep timer” and then, if possible within a certain range of user-specified playback speeds, have the speed auto-adjusted to make the playback take exactly that long. That is, if I have 15 minutes available to listen, make that 16m12s long episode take exactly 15 minutes to play.
Lachlan Green
2mo
I listen to podcasts at 4x, two a time, while I sleep. Anyone that doesn't isn't #grinding hard enough #FounderMode
Bob Ballings ✔
2mo
when possible these days I read the transcript. Reading is 3-5 times faster than listening.
Paul Lundin
2mo
Usually at 2x here but slow talkers can cause me to go up to 3x or higher If we could alternate speed based on speaker that would be perfect. More than a few podcasts have a speed mismatch between host and guest
Stephen McGregor
2mo
0.8 (Spanish) and 1.75-2.0 (English)
Gabor Nagy
2mo
It depends. If someone talks very slowly and clearly like Zuckerberg, I can do 5x or 6x. If it's a YouTube video with mostly visual explanations, or I'm refreshing what I already know, I can do 10x or 16x. If it's someone like Elon Musk (hard to understand) or Ben Shapiro (talks fast), I have to slow it down to 4x or even 2.5x.
That is fascinating! Thanks for sharing!
Layne Robinson
2mo
I've been a Pocket Cast user since I switched from Windows Phone to Android. But, I'm going to take a look at Metacast. [I listen at 3x speed.]
Aaron Mooney
2mo
I worked with visually impaired participants when I did my Thesis research. Sure enough, they increased the audio speed on all their assistive technologies. It was fascinating, as were their techniques for handling cash. Those participants taught me a lot about how they interact with the world.
Product & UX HoursFrom.World
2moSpeaking on impairments: Will you read new episodes titles and descriptions by voice to triage what to hear? Podcasts are all about the speech, yet nobody presents this by speech and most even crop titles and descriptions and present it in the smallest font in the world in the list so one must be clicking back and forth just to decide whether one want to spend 1h on listening the podcast. I'm not visually impaired, yet I think all about podcasts should be accessible by just hearing just to free hands and allow the usage while walking or activities as most people consume podcasts. Preferably even the triage should be done by simple voice commands.