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Sunday, October 06, 2013

Command line tool to speedup MP3 podcasts and audiobooks

Pilbeam on the piano by andyaldridge from flickr (CC-NC)
I added speedup_mp3 utility to my unix-utilities repository on github.

If your phone, mp3 player, or whatever else you use can't speed up podcasts/audiobooks enough, or it only does that while increasing the pitch, just use this utility.

It copies over important ID3v2 tags, so the files should generally be tagged correctly.

It works on Linux and OSX, you need sox and id3v2 programs installed first.

Usage examples:
speedup_mp3 -1.4 file_in.mp3 file_out.mp3
speedup_mp3 -1.5 directory_in directory_out (directory_out must exist first)

1.4 is a decent default speedup for most podcasts and audiobooks, but experiment until you find something you're comfortable with.

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