Variable Playback Speed

[daneren2005]

I am working on adding variable Playback speed (people usually only want it for Podcasts or Audio Books). I initially have implemented it as a setting that sticks until you turn it off. The more I think about it the more I wonder if it would make sense to only have it on for that song though. I am thinking if you switch to playing a song you wouldn't want it to still play fast. I don't particularly like increasing the Playback speed though so it is hard for me to understand how people would actually use it. Does anyone have an opinion on this?

[ArtW]

I actually needed a "speed up" when I recorded lectures at school some years ago. I did it manually in an audio editing program. I was able to save about 15%-20% of my time when re-listening to the material.I imagine that both speed up and slow down would be useful to people.

I don't have much need for speed up/slow down these days but here is my opinion. I lean toward the per song setting and only change the speed for the duration of the audio clip. I'd imagine most people would use it for podcasts/audio book/voice recordings and most would listen to it only once in a while. This way you do not need to save the setting per song anywhere on the server unless you plan to save it in the audio file somehow.

I'm not sure about the need for the global setting. After all I think it is unlikely that someone would need to globally affect the speed of all of their recordings. But... if someone has an audiobook with multiple chapters it would probably be convenient to set it once and forget for the duration of the book rather then adjust if for every chapter(file). Perhaps a "per album" setting or for the duration of the album? Of course the "on until turned off" per album/per file setting would require more management in the back-end where as global or per file duration setting would be simpler to maintain and use because there is really no need to track anything. To to summarize, potentially we can have:

1 Apply speed change per album (on until turned off for that album)
2 Apply speed change per album for the duration of the album (turned off automatically once album finishes)
3 Apply speed change per song for the duration of the song (turned off automatically once song finishes)
4 Apply speed change per song (on until turned off for that song)
5 Global change applicable to all files (on/off)

it's probably not feasible or worth the dev effort having all the options but I think that #2 and #3 would be the most useful to begin with.

Another setting would set the priority if multiple setting are present should a combinaion of the above options be implemented.

Just some food for thought

[daneren2005]

Alright so I think I am going to go with leaving it on until the album is changed. ie (replace song with podcast/audio book/whatever):

1) Single song. When switching to anything else turn off
2) Song with different album as next song: turn off after song completes
3) Song with the song from same album next: leave on for next song

This should cover both the case where playing a random song and only wanting it on for that one song and playing a set of audio books or podcasts and wanting to keep the speed the same.