
Your brain will have no problem following the words of what people are saying, but your understanding and retention will be dramatically affected.Īs Galen Beebe said in a recent Bello Collective newsletter, the sweet spot for certain shows might be. Good for getting the general idea of something. 2x and up: Similar to skimming a book.I only do this for one or two chat style shows that are lengthy and have a consistent format. The Daily has a pretty slow cadence and works for me at this speed. 1.5x: A sweet spot for interview shows where there aren’t any particularly fast talkers, or shows that you are very used to.1.3x: Perhaps starting to get too fast for highly produced and tightly edited shows or fiction where you don’t want to miss anything.1.2x: Still manageable for pretty much any show, particularly if you’ve grown accustomed to 1.1x.A nice way to shave a little time off your entire queue. 1.1x: You can easily listen to almost any show at this speed with barely a notice.But I will say, listening to music shows faster than 1x isn’t all the bad. 1x: Good for a show that relies heavily on music, like Song Exploder.Even among podcast purists, it has become more socially acceptable to turn up the speed. Listening at 1.1x or 1.2x feels nearly the same as 1x, and it still shaves off a noticeable bit of time. While some apps (like Apple Podcasts), offer a limited range of listening speeds, most apps provide a more granular level of control, allowing for increments of. Going straight from 1x speed to 1.5x speed can be overwhelming. One of the advantages of listening to a podcast (versus listening to music), however, is that you can slightly turn up the speed it plays without any noticeable difference. If you’ve never listened to a podcast at anything other than at 1x speed, 1.5x can feel downright silly. Maximizing the Most Common Settings Listening Speed I know there are dozens of apps out there, but this collection provides a good cross-section of what a majority of listeners are likely to use. The apps I chose to thoroughly dig into were Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro, Stitcher, Podcast Addict, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. Consider this your guide on how to maximize the obvious and not-so-obvious features sprinkled throughout the podcast app landscape. Most podcast apps now come with powerful features that are easy to overlook, and all it takes is around ten minutes playing around with a new app to get yourself up to speed.
