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More hours in the day

In the summer of '94 I sketched a design for my ideal 'mp3' player.  I didn't spec the compression format.  If I had, it would have been called a 'bit' player back then.  I wanted a walkman replacement.  However, the feature I most craved was understandable fast play, and rewind.  My motive was to record all my lectures for a day, then listen to them later in fast play, thus creating more hours in my day.

 

In 'Digital Death Lab' class, my lab partner, Gio, and I had implemented fast play as our final project.  Maintaining pitch is the hard part, you can toss pauses between words, but you can't just toss samples without making it sound like 'A Very Special Chipmunks Physics Lecture'.  I see that Windows media player 10 has fast play.  Does anyone know if mobile products expose it? 

 

Do any mp3 players solve my 'more hours in the day scenario' for a mobile device?

Published Thursday, October 20, 2005 9:47 AM by SteveJS
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# re: More hours in the day

Windows Media Player's fast play works extremely well on audio books and recorded talk radio. I speed it up to 1.4 (or sometimes 1.5) times normal and then make the equlizer look like an upside down 'U'. The equalizer will cut out most of the noise added by speed up by lowering the lower frequencies, increasing the middle frequencies and lowering the high frequencies.
I really appreciate cutting 1/3rd or more off of each hour of audio.
Monday, October 24, 2005 2:03 PM by X

# re: More hours in the day PaceMaker Plugin for

There's a very good free plugin for Winamp called PaceMaker I have v1.32 and you can change pitch, speed, and tempo independently!
It's fun to just slowly increase the tempo one percent at a time, and see if anyone notices! I use it to zoom through audiobooks. I'm still looking for some kind of plugin that chops out the silence between words - that would be even better, but Pacemaker can play stuff that's still understandable at even +70% speed, depending on the content.
Just google "pacemaker plugin" and it will come up with a link on the winamp website.
Friday, November 04, 2005 5:44 PM by Dave

# re: More hours in the day

The free PaceMaker plugin for Winamp is superb.
Just google "pacemaker plugin" and it will come up with a link on the winamp site for it.
Friday, November 04, 2005 5:45 PM by David

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