Speeding Up or Slowing Down Online Lecture Playback
Students sometimes ask the team at DEHelp if there is a way to speed up or slow down the playback of lectures in online courses. This lets them either get through the lecture material more quickly, or slow down the lecture audio when they feel that the speaker is going too fast. Currently, we know of only one product which enables this functionality: Enounce's MySpeed.
This is a commercial (not free) product. It does, however, let you speed up or slow down the playback of lectures in online courses. There are a few more points to keep in mind:
- You have to buy this product. The School does not offer free licenses to students.
- It distorts the voice of the speaker when you speed up or slow down playback. The faster/slower you go, the more distorted the voice gets.
- It does not speed or slow the playback of videos used in online courses. There's an explanation on the MySpeed site as to why this is the case.
- Neither DEHelp nor the School offers technical support for this product. You have to get help from the people who make it.
If you listen to MP3s of course lectures, you can use Windows Media Player (on Windows) or an application called VLC (free, cross-platform) to speed up or slow down the playback of MP3 audio. While it's easy to use either of these applications, if you need technical support with either of them, you'll have to turn to the appropriate vendor.