It's tangent time! We're trained to absorb ideas at the pace of film and TV, which are super tightly scripted and edited. By comparison, regular speech has the

It's tangent time! We're trained to absorb ideas at the pace of film and TV, which are super tightly scripted and edited. By comparison, regular speech has the density of a feather. Thank goodness for that ability to adjust the speed! I just wish the algorithms used to speed up playback on Youtube, in browsers, etc were given a little more love. They sound really poor compared to the time stretching available in professional audio tools (or even something like Overcast). It's not even a quality vs perf tradeoff — high quality granular resynthesis is pretty darn cheap, computationally. Alas, I often need to listen strictly at 2x, since the artifacts from non-integer multiples are too distracting to me. Too bad speed adjustment is such a niche feature.