Media Player Feature I Would Like To See

[tongodeon]

I'd like to be able to adjust the tempo of the music I'm listening to or increase the speed of the speaker whose podcast I'm listening to without shifting the pitch of the audio. This has been a trick found in very basic digital sound editors since the late 90s at least, and it seems like it ought to be possible to do this in realtime on today's

Comments

[leighton]

Maybe a Linux-ed iPod could be modded for this purpose? Though I haven't seen a functioning iPod running Linux play music in person.
...yet

Is there enough processing power in an iPod to keep the original pitch?

Seems like there was an "eBook" reader that did this pre-iPod, but it make have been a book-on-tape player / Dictopohone with "fast" settings.

[steeltoe]

You can do it with audiobooks on iPods.

[steeltoe]

Part two - you can convert anything mp3 into an "audiobook".

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041114214939859

[tongodeon]

Wow, that totally worked. This feature is already in the iPod. Now if only they'd let me flip this switch for any audio file rather than just the ones tagged as audiobooks.

[usernameguy]

I wonder if it's a bitrate concern - like, audiobooks are pretty low bitrate, so maybe the hardware can hack the rate-shift without a pitch-shift. But with normal music, it's higher bitrate, so it's harder.