![pocket casts playback speed pocket casts playback speed](https://ausdroid.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Playback.png)
Discover hidden gems with powerful search tools and human-curated recommendations.It was a very 2008-era-Apple decision.Pocket Casts should be the podcast app you listen to and through which you distribute your content. This is probably why Apple originally used the misleading labels: to give people what’s probably best for them, while giving them the illusion that they’re getting what they think they want. I’d rather unsubscribe to a third of my shows or skip a third of the episodes. I’ve tried listening to a few shows like this, but I don’t find it useful. I asked Pocket Casts’ developer about this, and the app isn’t specifically creating this behavior - this is just what happens when you give AVPlayer a rate of greater than 2.0. Playback completes in the correct amount of time for true “3x”, but you’re missing a third of what’s being said. Between 0.5 and 2.0, it appears to be rounding to the nearest kTimePitchParam_Rate value.ĭuring “3x” playback, the audio is actually playing at 2x speed, but every 1.5 seconds, it skips ahead by 0.5 seconds. Pocket Casts has a speed slider that advertises 0.1x-granularity over a range of 0.5–3.0. It’s easy to measure: use a separate stopwatch (either a real one or a second iOS device) and see how much real time passes relative to the podcast’s timestamp. This will haunt you in reviews and feature comparisons forever. Customers will request that you add speeds from inaccurately-labeled apps (e.g.
![pocket casts playback speed pocket casts playback speed](http://www.techsurprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Pocket-Casts.jpg)
If you use speed-accurate labels, you’ll look worse in direct comparisons. You can even offer a “3x” label, representing 2x playback, since Apple’s old scheme topped out at a “2x” label for 1.5x playback.īut this tricks customers and reviewers into thinking you’re offering something you’re really not, and thinking any competitors with speed-accurate labels are inferior. If you use the old, inaccurate labels, people accustomed to the old labels will see your speeds as equivalent. Labeling the speeds in the interface is still a non-obvious choice, though. (And that’s probably for the best: true 2x playback is very fast and hard to keep up with.) 3 It’s very unlikely, therefore, that we’ll see an iOS podcast app that can legitimately offer playback faster than 2x. They’re not nearly as natural-sounding and listenable as Apple’s built-in (but limited) AVAudioPlayer/iPodTime algorithm that’s specifically designed for processing speech. But they’re much more complex to use, much harder on the CPU and battery, and mostly designed for music. If you dive down to very low-level APIs, you can use different audio units to vary playback speed by different amounts, or you can bundle a third-party time-stretching algorithm such as Dirac. AudioUnitParameterValue is a Float32 rounded by the unit to whichever of the following is closest: 0.5, 0.66667, 0.8, 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 2. The kTimePitchParam_Rate parameter declared in AudioUnitParameters.h is used to control audio playback rate from 0.5x to 2.0x speed. Under the hood, those use the AUiPodTime AudioUnit, which only supports a handful of speeds: Why?Īs far as I can tell, all popular podcast players on iOS are using Apple’s AVAudioPlayer or AVPlayer rate parameter to offer variable-speed playback. Note that nobody has a true speed of less than 0.5 or greater than 2.0, and nobody offers any unique intermediate speeds such as 1.1x or 0.9x that actually sound different from nearby “even” speeds such as 1.0 or 1.25. Range is 0.5–3.0, sort of - the 3.0 speed is simulated from 2x audio. Advertising range 0.5–3.0, but true range is 0.8–2.0. Advertising range 0.5–3.0, but true range is 0.67–2.0. Advertising range 0.5–2.0, but true range is 0.8–1.5. Podcast apps therefore face a difficult choice: do you use Apple’s old label scheme, which is familiar but inaccurate, or do you use correct labels? Here’s how the top apps chose, as of today: 1 Apple’s “2x” setting, for instance, was really 1.5x. In the early days of iOS podcast playback, when Apple first implemented multiple speed settings, they used inaccurate labels.
#POCKET CASTS PLAYBACK SPEED HOW TO#
One of my most surprisingly difficult decisions for Overcast is how to label the playback speeds. A programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.