Podcast playback faster than 1x speed on iPod

Question

I listen to several MP3-based podcasts on my 3rd Generation iPod Nano and many of them are in a pure talk radio format (mostly talking, generally no/little music). I've been trying to find a way to speed up the playback of the podcasts. I know for audiobooks you can choose to have them played back faster, but I don't want to have to deal with converting every downloaded podcast over to an audiobook before syncing it to the iPod. I've also seen this question about speeding it up in iTunes, but I'm looking for speeding it up no matter where I'm listening to it.

I have tried to use http://podshifter.com/ before, but there seems to be a stability/reliability issue with the site from my experience. The issues with it have ranged from not accepting the RSS feed itself, to being unavailable when iTunes is checking the feeds. So preferably I'd like a client-side solution.

NOTE: I am using Windows to run iTunes and sync with the iPod.

Answer 1

Although jjeaton's answer didn't give me all that I needed, it did point me in a great direction. I wrote up a blog post about it, but the gist of it is that I ended up using SOX and Powershell to automate the process. Read the blog post for more details about it.

Answer 2

Audacity will allow you to adjust the speed of an MP3 file using "Change Speed" in the "Effect" dropdown menu. You may also need to use "Change Pitch" to lower the pitch of the sped-up file.

It is free, open source and cross platform.

You can also batch process files with Audacity. A few years ago I had issues setting up batch processing in Audacity, as it was only available in the beta version, but that may be resolved by now.