This is a pretty obvious one, but I only figured it out today…

It’s RIPE meeting week, and in order to catch up on the sessions I haven’t been able to watch live I’ve been playing back the MP3 files at +40% speed using the Pacemaker plugin for Winamp. Suddenly an idea hit me… I can turn the knob the other way…

I am currently listening to a Japanese Tech Podcast (週刊netreport) with Pacemaker set to slow down the speed by 20% and have countered the slow down by setting pitch +3. This is giving me natural sounding audio with slightly slower than normal speech to stop words running together, etc.

If you find natural audio sources a bit quick, this is a handy method to slow things down just a bit to help you get on top of it. I think I’ll be using it a lot :)