To speed up or not to speed up.

I recently traded in my older 30GB third generation iPod for one of the newer 40GB 4th generation ones.  Other than the added capacity and storage space, the main reason, I told myself, I needed one, was the new iPods’ ability to speed up or slow down audiobook playback without actually increasing the PITCH of the speaker’s voice and making it sound like you were listening to Alvin recite Master and Commander – or alternately Fat Albert.

As some who’ve been following my blog for a while know, I like listening to audiobooks.  I have a subscription with Audible.com, which is a great service if you like Audiobooks, have a high-speed internet connection, and want to pay less than what you would if you bought the same thing at a store.  Of course going to the library would be much cheaper, but then you have to return it within a given period of time, among other issues.  Once you buy a book on Audible, you can download it as many times as you want from your central “Library.”  You can buy books ala carte, or you can subscribe to a “Listener” program where you get a couple books a month at $10 each.  Audible has radio programs and newspaper and magazine transcripts read that you can subscribe to as well.the iPod is one of the devices that can play Audible content, which isn’t in an open format like MP3.  In any case, I have subscribed for about five years now, although after starting to date my now wife I put the subscription on hold as I simply didn’t have the time to listen.  After we got engaged I got her a subscription and renewed my own.  Now we both listen so that we don’t have to talk to each other!  Just kidding! 

While two  books a month may not seem like a huge amount, that might average out to 20 hours, or about 45 minutes a day just to keep up.  Of course along the way Audible has thrown a free book at me here and there either because I referred someone or because I made a complaint about a problem or for completely unknown reasons.  This and the propensity for me to be addicted to NPR radio, thus usurping prime downtime away from audio books, has left me with a large backlog of books I haven’t read.  Something on the order of 35 books.  Just stop listening for a couple of months and you’re yet another 4 books in the hole!

When we stopped by the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner in order to get an iTrip for my wife’s new iPod Mini, I had no clue that we would be confronted by the new “4G” iPod models as they are called.  I convinced myself that I should buy the new one and sell my old one, thus getting away with simply paying a small “upgrade fee” and potentially benefiting by getting through audio books faster, and thus having a real hope of reading all my Audible content within my lifetime!  Of course, this was back in July when I had started listening to NPR again and hadn’t listened to an audiobook in several weeks.  Getting the new iPod somehow didn’t remotivate me to get back into audio books until now.  After all, there was the Democratic National Convention, the Olympics, and now the Republican National Convention, and we also had a vacation. 

Now that I’m finally back to the books, I decided to try out the speeding up feature of the new iPods.  It does what it’s supposed to, but with some caveats.  You can definitely hear some “clipping” of some of the voice here and there.  It hasn’t been so bad that it’s distracting or makes it harder to understand, although once in a while it does seem to cut something out that makes a difference and I have to just accept that I’m not going to get that particular sentence.  Because things go faster, it does actually encourage you to pay more attention.  Depending on the audio book, I can sometimes lose focus, just as with a book, then I find myself realizing that I’ve been thinking about something else while I’ve lost seconds or minutes worth of the book!  But I found myself paying more attention because without that, you can easily miss things, or more things than you would at a slower playback.  I don’t know if it is the clipping or something else, but the other issue I’ve had is that the playback seems like it is of a lower quality.  It almost sounds like the audio artifacts you might get from a satellite phone, but not nearly as extreme and only for split seconds here and there. 

Finally, I just decided that I needed to quantify the benefit I was supposedly getting from this speeding up of the book.  I expected it to be dramatic, but I also wasn’t sure how it worked.  In principle it’s very easy to imagine how programmers might simply scan ahead through a file and look for spaces where there is very little in the way of sound, and then tell the iPod to skip over most of this blank space.  Thus, I figured, the amount you save it time must vary a lot based on the book.  If a narrator has lots of dramatic pauses, and generally speaks more slowly and methodically, the time savings could be much more dramatic than a narrator who speaks quickly and with few pauses.  So, I played a couple of audio books with the speed set to high and looked at where they were at 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, and 60 minutes.  At first it seemed like as I was taking the numbers down, the “time compression” rate was changing, but I soon found a pattern, and that pattern was repeated in two different audio books I tried this with, ‘Tis Unabridged by Frank McCourt, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera.  Perhaps others could confirm this with other test, but the testing was too similar to deny this pattern.  What I found was that for every X amount of regular time that went by 1.25 times that amount would go by within the audio book.  In other words, to read a 10 hour book, it would only take 1/1.25 x 10 hours or 80% of the normal 10 hours being 8 hours.  This is a decent amount of time saved, although it does take a lot of books before it really gets noticeable.  If my 35 or so books average out to 10 hours (it’s probably a bit higher), than that’s 350 hours, and so if I play them at the higher speed, I end up saving 70 hours of time!  That’s almost 3 days!  Or more applicably, it’s probably a good 2+ months worth of listening to small amounts on a daily basis.

The real question, though, is all this added time I will have worth the lesser audio quality of the books.  I also assume that some books just will not take very well to the faster pace.  You lose something tangible but also something intangible in a beautiful narration of some books.  A dry non-fiction piece would probably be fine, but a novel with a skilled narrator that inserts dramatic pauses, and has a very specific and effective timing, which is dashed by the speeding up, would not work very well, I’m afraid.  I guess the conclusion, then, is just to take it book by book.  One strategy might be listening to the first 10 minutes in normal speed to get a feel for the narration, and then switching it and seeing how they compare – whether too much is lost or whether it gives about the same feel, just faster.

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