Accelerate your learning with software

Posted on Edited on Disqus: Word count in article: 1.3k Reading time ≈ 1 mins.

Podcasts and videos are typical ways of learning online, but there are so many of them and humans have the tendency to collect them. So, it becomes necessary to increase the speed at which we consume them.

Normally, people can process their native language at a high speed.
For me, double speed is comfortable, triple speed is acceptable, and with subtitles, quadruple speed is enough.

Desktop

A few years ago, when I was still in college, I used Windows and the best video player among all types of players was KMPlayer because other players may have sound distortion when changing. Later, the author left the company and rewrote a new player in C++, renaming it as PotPlayer.

On macOS, my preferred choice is Movist, also from Korea. Needless to say, it is brilliant and simple, providing up to 4 times the audio track without much loss.
Other players like MPV offer unlimited speed (yes, you can accelerate to any speed you like) and are open-source. However, if you want to change the default settings, you have to modify ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf each time.

Mobile

The good news is that Podcasts on iPhone already have a 2x feature (strangely, iTunes Podcasts don’t). Many learning apps also have this useful feature.

However, I haven’t found any app that goes beyond 2x speed.

According to ο£Ώ

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let player = AVAudioPlayer()
player.prepareToPlay()
player.enableRate = true
player.rate = 2.0
player.play()

If the audio is file-based media, it seems that only changing player.rate = 3.0 can achieve that. Would it cause distortion?

If I have time one day, I will try it out.

Translated by gpt-3.5-turbo