Listening to more podcasts in less time with iOS

If you’re like me, you enjoy listening to podcasts and you probably have a long list of podcasts that you subscribe to. That means you probably don’t have time to listen to all of them as much as you’d like. Well, Apple’s iOS makes it easy to listen to more podcasts in a shorter amount of time. With a feature in the Music  app (formerly the iPod app on the iPhone) called “2X”, you can listen to podcasts in half the time. Here’s how:

Select a podcast to play

On your iOS device, tap the Music app. Depending on what version of the iOS software you are running, and what device you are running it on, your app may be called iPod and may have a different icon. (If you are using an iPod touch, you have the Music app. If you are using an iPad or iPhone with iOS 5 or later, then you also have the Music app. Any iOS version on iPhone or iPad prior to iOS 5 will most likely have the iPod app.)

Here you can see the differences between the Music and iPod apps on each device.

Bringing up the controls

I’ve selected one of my favorite podcasts, The Dave Ramsey Show. Once you’ve selected an episode and it begins to play, the top of your screen should look like this;

If your screen doesn't look like this, simply tap anywhere in the middle of the screen and the controls should appear.

 Learning the controls

There are three main controls here that we need to cover. (Four if you count the scrubber bar, but that’s pretty self explanatory.)

1. Email
2. Rewind
3. Speed

The first two aren’t very important for our needs here, but I’ll cover them anyway.

Email to a friend

The first control on the left is so that you can email this episode, actually a link to the episode in iTunes, to yourself or to a friend. Pretty straight forward right? Tap the icon, an email opens, enter an address, hit send. Easy enough.

Quick rewind

The middle button is the 30 second rewind button. What does it do? Well, rewinds 30 seconds. If you missed something or you want to hear something again and you don’t want to fuss with using the scrubber, simply tap the 30 second rewind icon and the track will rewind 30 seconds for you.

Speed controls

Here’s where we control the speed of the podcast. Apple has given us 3 options for the speed of our podcasts: 1X, 2X, and 1/2X. When you first start out a podcasts, by default it is on the 1X speed. This means normal speed. If you want to speed up the podcast, you simply tap the 1X icon and it will turn blue and change to a 2X icon.

Now you're listening at twice the normal speed

While this may sound strange, you can actually understand what’s being said at even twice the speed. Its really a great option and it certainly cuts down on time it takes to listen to a podcast. Instead of an hour long podcast, you can get the same amount of info in 30 minutes. I love this feature and it really comes in handy when I’m trying to make it through a ton of podcasts and I only have a 40 minute commute to work.

Faster isn’t always better

While its pretty handy to be able to speed up the podcasts, you may not always want it to be faster. Sometimes you need to slow things down and really focus on what’s being said. Well, Apple’s got ya covered there, too. If you tap the blue 2X icon one more time, it will change to a blue 1/2X icon.

Now you're listening at half the speed.

I don’t use this option much. That doesn’t mean some of you won’t find this handy, even more so than the 2X speed option. I just don’t have time to turn a 1 hour podcast into a 2 hour listening session. But, to each his own.

I hope this helps some of you podcast lovers out there. It has certainly come in handy for me several times during my commute to work or my lunch break. It’s not great for every podcast, but its a nice option to have.

I would love to know if any of you use this option or if you prefer to just listen at normal speed. Have you tried faster? Slower? Let me know what you think or if you have any questions. I’d love to hear from you guys.